Statutes: Civil Rights Counterattack

Four young men have sweated out the comforts of the county jail in Americus, Ga., ever since August, when they were arrested during civil rights demonstrations. They cannot be freed on bail—they have been charged with "inciting an insurrection," a crime that, in Georgia at least, is punishable by death.

So harsh a sentence is hardly likely, but dusting off the long-unused 1871 statute serves a practical purpose: it provides a handy way to keep three annoying white men and one Negro locked up indefinitely. In some communities, so many Negroes are being held prisoner that detention facilities are swamped. In Leesburg, Ga., recently, 20 young girls aged 11 to 15 were kept for as long as a month in a single room without beds or blankets.

Ugly American. All over the South, officials impatient with the power of familiar statutes passed in the interests of public safety—laws against disorderly conduct, impeding traffic, loitering, and the like—have resurrected an odd armory full of rusty legal weaponry with which to mount a counterattack against the insistent forces of integration. Examples:

— In Danville, Va., 14 civil rights leaders are awaiting trial under a state law that makes it a crime to conspire to incite Negroes to "acts of violence and war" against whites, or vice versa. A relic of slavery days, the law was designed to prevent slave revolts.

>In Atlanta, Ga., last June a white minister who tried to enter a segregated church in company with two Negroes was tried under a 112-year-old state law declaring it a misdemeanor to interrupt "in any manner a congregation lawfully assembled for divine worship." He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, plus an extra six months of labor at "public works" after his prison term.

> In East Baton Rouge, La., two young men who visited a fellow civil rights demonstrator in jail were arrested themselves and charged with violating Louisiana's law against "criminal anarchy." Passed during World War I and updated during World War II, the law makes it a crime, punishable by up to ten years at hard labor, to teach or advocate "subversion, opposition or destruction" of the federal or state government. The principal evidence against the youths appeared to be that they brought their friend a copy of The Ugly American.

Legal Barbed Wire. Whenever the revival of antique laws has not satisfied segregationists, Southern states and municipalities have reached in the other direction and passed scores of new statutes. Seven states enacted laws against "barratry" (inciting lawsuits) to harass civil rights organizations and their lawyers. When civil rights pickets gathered at the only movie house in Americus one Saturday last July, members of the city council rounded up a quorum, swiftly passed an ordinance declaring that henceforth picketing would be permitted only between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., that there must be no more than two pickets per city block, and that the pickets must stay at least 20 feet apart and within 24 inches of the curb. Several demonstrators were arrested under the new law that very evening.