Civil Rights: Ahead of Its Time

Legislation in recent years has gone a long way toward bolstering the Negro's rights in such fundamental areas as education and voting and toward easing his economic plight with a spate of antipoverty programs. Compared with such far-reaching laws, the 1966 civil rights bill seemed something of an anticlimax. It sought to right some blatant wrongs, most notably discrimination in the selection of juries and the sale or rental of housing. Yet, compared with the earlier legislation, the open-housing provision literally came a lot closer to home. The sad, even outrageous, but inescapable fact seems to be that the white is not yet acclimatized to the notion of having a Negro for a neighbor. So the bill last week became the first civil rights measure to be killed by Congress in nine years.

It died almost ignominiously, without even coming to a vote in the Senate. After twelve days of deliberation over a motion to take up the measure, its supporters made their second, foredoomed attempt to choke off debate, but mustered only a 52-to-41 majority for cloture—ten short of the necessary two-thirds of those present and voting. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield thereupon recited the epitaph. "It would be futile," said he, "to prolong consideration of this issue."

Simmering Summer. Bitter postmortems pinned the blame variously on the Senate's Democrats, one-third of whom voted against cloture; on the Republicans, two-thirds of whom did the same; on President Johnson, who did not twist arms with his usual vigor to line up support; on civil rights leaders, who fell to quarreling among themselves, failed to lobby effectively.

To many cartoonists and editorial writers, the man chiefly responsible was Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, who at one point observed: "Someone has to kill Cock Robin, and it might as well be me." Last week, however, Dirksen argued that the Administration had signally failed to ride to Robin's rescue. "Where was Hubert? Where was the President?" he rumbled. Pointing to the Democrats' 67-33 margin in the Senate, he added: "Had the Democrats in the Senate truly wished it, the bill would have passed."

Dirksen knew perfectly well, of course, that a solid score of those Democrats are Southern segregationists, hence that no civil rights bill stands a chance without G.O.P. support. All the same, Majority Leader Mansfield, for one, refused to make Dirksen the scapegoat. He reasoned that support for the bill had been eroded by the "rioting, marches, shootings and inflammatory statements which have characterized this simmering summer." He indicted, in particular, the evangelists of black power, "those who, in the name of racial equality or perhaps more accurately in the name of a new racial superiority, have not advocated further civil rights legislation but, in fact, have actively spoken and fought against it."