Men Against Inevitability

In the world's eyes, the U.S. seemed to be sitting atop a curious paradox. On the one hand, there was the image of President Eisenhower, returning from still another successful good-will trip abroad, where by force of personality and earnest pleadings, he characterized for millions of Latin Americans the U.S. principles of fair play, human dignity and equality (see The Presidency). Yet the President came home to Washington to see what the world also saw: the U.S. Senate ground to a halt by a Southern filibuster that, in broad perspective, seemed dedicated to denying the Southern Negro his constitutional right to vote.

The obvious contradiction between Ike's U.S. and the filibuster's U.S. told more about the outcome of the Senate struggle than any of the round-the-clock oratory or pungent rhetoric. The right to vote is so basic a right that the right to filibuster could not hope to stand successfully against it. And federal guarantee of voting rights would ultimately lead Negroes via the ballot box toward all the other equal rights that have been denied them.

Thoughtful U.S. Southerners—including many Senators who were going through the Shintoesque ceremonial of the filibuster—knew full well that their case against the right to vote was doomed. Said the Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel last week: "It must be generally realized that this repression of Negro citizens won't be tolerated indefinitely—and that remedies enforced by the national will are bound to be more distasteful than measures instituted through willing compromise." Summed up an editorial in North Carolina's Charlotte Observer: "Here is a fight of words against time, of men against inevitability, of voices against the ebbing strength that portends eventual silence."