Question Ducked

When she refused to sit in the Jim Crow section of a Norfolk-Baltimore bus, Irene Morgan, a Negro, was thrown out and fined $10. Virginia's highest court upheld the action. But an appeal was made to the U.S. Supreme Court. This week seven nimble Justices ducked the racial question and settled everything on the basis of comfortable traveling.

Ten states,* they noted, have Jim Crow laws. Eighteen states specifically forbid segregation. Said Justice Reed, of Kentucky: segregation imposes an undue burden on interstate commerce. In other words, it is too much trouble to have bus riders changing seats as buses roll from one state to another. The Justices held that segregation on interstate buses is illegal.

On buses which operate within one state, Jim Crow seating is still all right. That is the states' business.

On a busy decision day, the Court handed down two other notable rulings. It gave balm to three New Dealers--Robert Morss Lovett, Goodwin B. Watson, and William E. Dodd--whose salaries had been withheld in 1943 by Congress merely because they had been dubbed "radical" by the Dies Committee. The Court called Congress' action a "bill of attainder"--and gave Congress the hardest rap in more than a decade.

Then it tackled the subject of a free press. It ruled that the Miami Herald was not in contempt of court when it attacked and lampooned the Dade County Circuit Court for ducking the prosecution of county criminals. Wrote Justice Murphy: "The freedom of the press includes the right to criticize and discourage, even though the terms be vitriolic, scurrilous or erroneous."

*Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia.

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