THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

What It Is & Where It Stands

Convening in January, the U.S. Congress appeared certain to pass the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. As late as March the Eisenhower Administration's civil rights bill seemed headed . for surprisingly smooth congressional sailing. But as Congressmen return from their Easter vacations, the civil rights package is in the deepest sort of trouble. The trouble is compounded of real fears about the principles of the bill and of shrewd Southern maneuvering against it.

THE Administration's civil rights bill is the result of three years' intensive study by the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. It is aimed less at making major substantive changes in the civil rights laws than at offering new methods of enforcing laws already on the books.

Since Reconstruction the U.S. has had criminal statutes providing fines of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to ten years for persons acting to deprive others of their rights to equal protection under the law--including the right to vote in federal elections. These laws have been generally ineffective for the simple reason that Southern juries would not vote for conviction. The U.S. also has civil statutes under which a private citizen can file suit to protect his own civil rights. But these too have been ineffective, mostly because of a requirement that the litigant go through the timeconsuming, vastly expensive machinery of local administrative agencies and state courts before reaching the federal courts.

New Power. The new bill would bypass the administrative agencies and state courts and give a civil rights plaintiff the right, generally denied him in the past by judicial ruling, to take his case directly to the federal courts. And in its most controversial provision it would empower the U.S.

Attorney General to file civil suits (obviously he already has the right to prosecute criminal violations) whenever "any persons have engaged or there are reasonable grounds to believe that any persons are about to engage" in acts that would violate existing civil rights statutes.

An example of how the new system might work: a white man threatens to harm a Negro if the Negro votes. The Negro complains to the Justice Department but is himself afraid--or too poor--to file suit. The Attorney General, under the new law, would bring suit in the name of the U.S.

The white man's threat was not in itself a violation of the civil rights statutes. But it would probably be considered "reasonable grounds to believe" that he intended to deprive the Negro of his voting rights. The Attorney General could thus ask the courts for an injunction against the white man.

The burden of proof would be on the Government. The defendant would have the usual rights to cross-examine, present witnesses and appeal. If the injunction were issued and the white man ignored it by, say, continuing to threaten the Negro, he could be held in civil contempt. At his contempt hearing he would not have the right to a jury trial--a key point in the program. If found guilty, he could be jailed until he purged himself of the contempt by agreeing to obey the injunction.

The civil rights bill would also provide for a new Assistant Attorney General to handle civil rights cases and would set up a six-member bipartisan commission with subpoena powers to conduct a two-year study of civil rights. But it is around the provision granting the Attorney General the power to file civil suits that the storm of criticism and reply has blown up. Arguments:

THE SOUTH: The clause giving complainants the right to bypass local administrative agencies and state courts and go directly to federal court on rights violations "nullifies state law."

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: If state laws are in opposition to valid federal laws, they are nullified under the U.S. Constitution, and the sooner the matter is adjudicated, the better for all concerned.

THE SOUTH: The Attorney General would have the right to burst into all sorts of situations where he has no business, harass and thus drive from public office state or local officials whom he might suspect and, in a sense, have the unthinkable power of actually making laws. Example: he could get a court order breaking up a White Citizens' Council meeting.

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: The Attorney General could act only where existing civil rights statutes were violated (or where he could show "reasonable grounds" for believing that they were about to be violated). White Citizens' Councils could certainly continue to meet and could even plan and carry out economic boycotts.

Gone with the Jury. It is on an issue developed by North Carolina's respected Democratic Senator Sam Ervin Jr., onetime judge on his state's Supreme Court, that the Southerners have built their first line of defense. As a member of a Judiciary subcommittee conducting hearings on the civil rights bill, Ervin began asking questions about "the abolition of trial by jury." This, he argued, would result from the civil contempt citations against persons disobeying the courts' injunctions under the new bill. It would, cried Ervin, be a "tragic error to attempt the protection of civil rights for any one group through a process which denies a liberty equally precious--that of trial by jury. The Administration's civil rights proposals will do exactly this."

Sam Ervin's trial-by-jury slogan was taken up by Southern newspapers. Indeed, the issue worried many who were otherwise friendly to civil rights. Yet the contempt citation is the judiciary's historic enforcement tool. Jury trials in contempt cases have absolutely no basis in equity or constitutional law and precious little legislative sanction.* As early as 1894, the Supreme Court wrote: "Surely it cannot be supposed that the question of contempt of the authority of a court of the U.S., committed by-a disobedience of its orders, is triable, of right, by a jury." North Carolina Supreme Court Judge Ervin himself on four occasions upheld the right of the courts to try for contempt--without juries.

The Opening Salvos. Yet Sam Ervin's trial-by-jury issue has already come to dominate the civil rights fight, principally because the slogan can easily outrun the difficult and technical counter-explanation. It has so strengthened the Southern position that civil rights backers may find it impossible to obtain the 64 votes necessary to cut off a Senate filibuster. The Southerners are within shooting distance of a Senate majority for an amendment that would require jury trials in civil rights contempt cases; Wyoming's Democratic Senator Joseph O'Mahoney has announced his support of such an amendment, while apparently wavering are such influential Senators as Minority Leader William Knowland of California and Assistant Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. Such an amendment, said Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney III, would "emasculate the whole bill." Olney's choice of words, retorted Southerners, merely proved that the original intention of the bill was to rape the South. With those salvos, the big guns of the civil rights bill began booming this week.

*With a single exception, trial by jury has never been required in contempt cases to which the U.S. Government was a party. The exception: the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 required jury trials in contempt proceedings arising from labor disputes. The provision was in effect repealed (with the enthusiastic approval of most Southern Congressmen) by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

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