I work closely with them-who would hope or would expect to make any such proposal that would deprive other Americans of the right of freedom of association and choice.

All they ask is equality of opportunity, to participate in the same freedom of association and choice that other Americans enjoy.

Indeed, I think we can look at Senator Javits' great State of New York which has perhaps the most progressive, most liberal, most advanced civil rights legislation in any State of the Union in the field of private housing, and yet they find the great Negro communities joined together by voluntary preference, as are the other ethnic and religious communities.

The question is basic equality of opportunity.

If Senator Ervin, as chairman of this subcommittee, would report favorably this bill and other bills, so that a national policy would be established by this Congress to remove racial discrimination, the agitation, the unrest, all of these things, would disappear, just as they have with the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, and others.

Senator ERVIN. Do you just believe that the mere passage of laws would abolish all these problems?

Mr. SHIPLEY. I believe we went through these problems with other ethnic groups as they stepped onto the opportunity ladder and moved into the mainstream of our national life. I believe certainly the most immediate business of the Nation, regardless of the impact, the business upset, the social maladjustments or readjustments necessary, if our Nation is to continue, is that every American must have the same concern with our national life, the same commitment to it, the same stake in it as every other American. Unless this Congress establishes such a national policy and makes us all toe the mark, we will not make the necessary adjustments to include Negroes as we have done with every other racial and religious group in our national community. We must have a living accommodation with each other, regardless of race.

Senator ERVIN. My whole life has been involved with law. You have more faith in the law than I have. I do not think that racial problems or any other human problems can be completely solved by law. I think they have to be solved in the local community where people live and move and have their being. The idea that these problems can be solved by dictation from the courts and dictation from legislative bodies, I think, is what has caused an awful lot of the turmoil that is going on in this country today.

Mr. SHIPLEY. I agree, Senator. I have read many of your judicial decisions and read your speeches as they have appeared in the Congressional Record. You are a great and learned scholar of the law. You would be the first to agree that those decisions of yours, which have guided the lives and property of many Americans and have been quoted and requoted in many courts, have been followed through voluntary compliance. We depend upon a voluntary compliance by all Americans with the law, and our Constitution.

You do not have and you cannot have enough policemen, and you cannot recruit enough soldiers to send to Oxford or Birmingham or Arkansas to enforce these laws unless there is voluntary compliance. This Congress must set the national policy and serve as the conscience of our Nation and make us all see, whether we like it or not, that this Nation cannot endure unless every American, including this large

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Negro group, which is growing more numerous, better educated, with higher incomes, and thus has a greater capacity to insist upon basic rights, which they have every just expectation shall be recognized has an equal chance in an atmosphere of fair play. The sooner we recognize it the sooner the problem will disappear, and we will get along with dealing with the Russians and other people.

Senator ERVIN. I am interested in some of the recommendations made in the field of housing, particularly here in the District. Mr. SHIPLEY. We have gone pretty far out in some of them. Senator ERVIN. You have recommendations for the abolition of discrimination in housing. There used to be a law that a man had the right to do with his property as he saw fit as long as he did not injure anybody else in his use of it. Wouldn't your recommendations work like this-if you have a policy forbidding discrimination on racial grounds in the sale and rental of housing, and if a man had a house to rent, and two men applied, one belonging to the white race and one to the colored race, and if each of them offered the same price for that house, wouldn't the owner be compelled to sell to the colored man rather than to the white man because if he refused to sell to the colored man he could be brought before a governmental agency, but if he refused to sell to the white man he could not?

Mr. SHIPLEY. I think that would be the purpose of any housing ordinance that might be promulgated in the District or any legislation which they are now considering in the House of Representatives. However, I suggest to the Senate that none of us has the right to sell a house now, for example, to be a house of prostitution or a gambling den. We all come under prohibitions. We cannot sell our house for the purpose of violating the law, and it seems to me when we are dealing with racial discrimination we are dealing not only with a violation of the law but a violation of the Constitution itself. We have to approach it that way and we cannot separate it.

Senator ERVIN. You would not equate the sale of a house to a Caucasian as violating the laws, with the sale of a house which is going to be used for a house of prostitution, would you?

Mr. SHIPLEY. No, sir. But I think, Senator, the point I am attempting to make is, we do have restrictions on the right of an owner to sell his home now, but we do not have a restriction on his right to sell or not sell based on race alone. Racial discrimination is pretty difficult to prove. There might be other considerations.

I think this law, like all of our laws, such as the reasonable man rule, certificates of public convenience and necessity, all these vague phrases that you of the judiciary have given life and meaning to, that you would give substance and practical meaning to any housing regulations so that we could meet the goals of equal opportunity.

Senator ERVIN. In other words, is it not a fact that the Government is condemning the rights of private property in order to enforce some people's ideas of discrimination? You are robbing the man of the right to sell his house to whomsoever he pleases.

Mr. SHIPLEY. He cannot do that now. He has to

Senator ERVIN. Well, he could up to the time when this agitation came up, couldn't he?

Mr. SHIPLEY. I do not think he could sell it for criminal purposes, as I have pointed out. He is limited, and he must sell it to a person

who can pay the taxes, a person who is going to use it primarily for residential purposes. There is a great limitation with respect to whom he can sell it to, and we are adding just one more, that he cannot refuse to sell it to anybody because of race alone, without other consideration. It is a complicated area.

Senator ERVIN. It is a complicated area, and the result is that proposed solutions are solutions based upon the theory that one group of Americans must be robbed of their rights in order to serve the interests of another group.

Mr. SHIPLEY. I cannot conceive of any court or administrative agency coming out with that kind of a conclusion in our voluntary system of law. It would be at such cross purposes with the individual's rights which our Constitution protects.

Senator ERVIN. Don't you think that if a man can be hailed up before an agency of Government on the complaint of a colored man that he wanted to buy his house which was sold instead to a white man, although the colored man offered the same price that is coercing the white people into selling to Negroes?

Mr. SHIPLEY. If that is all that the complainant had to prove, that is so. But I think you would have to prove that the failure to sell it to him was on the basis of race alone.

As I understand all of these proposals, and we have asked the city of Louisville for a copy of their new ordinance which was referred to in one of our newspapers yesterday, to see whether it might be applicable here in the making of the Capital City as a kind of a model for the rest of the country. Negroes will be given the same rights, not greater rights than other persons.

Senator ERVIN. The Civil Rights Commission made a recommendation. I believe, as a result of its inquiry into housing in the District

Mr. SHIPLEY. Yes, sir.

Senator ERVIN (continuing). In which it recommended that the Commissioners of the city of Washington, of the District, adopt an ordinance to deprive any realtor of his license to pursue his occupation or his livelihood if he practiced any discrimination in the sale of housing.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Yes, sir; and it had bipartisan support of both political parties, but on the grounds that a realtor was not entitled to a license if he persisted in violating the Constitution and the law.

Senaor ERVIN. Well, now, does that not mean that any realtor who sells the house to a white person when a colored person is desirous of buying a house and is willing to pay the same price, is under compulsion to sell to the colored man instead of the white man?

Mr. SHIPLEY. Well, it puts to him the choice as to whether he will abide by the Constitution and the laws or he will not.

Senator ERVIN. Yes. But that is to be made by an agency which is usually staffed by persons who are more or less zealots on the subject. They are to determine this whole question from something which is concealed on the inside of the mind, are they not?

Mr. SHIPLEY. Well, I think that the relationship of the real estate broker to his principal is really the flaw in this proposal. Somehow we are going to have to find a resolution of it. The agent, after all, is just the servant of the master. He is just the spokesman for the principal-the owner.

Senator ERVIN. But don't you think it is a very dangerous thing to make one's right to earn a livelihood in his chosen profession dependent upon what some other people who may be zealots find was the hidden motive in his mind at the time he acted?

Mr. SHIPLEY. I do. But I think it is more dangerous to permit the continuance of an accepted national policy of denying equal opportunity in the field of housing or any other field to 10 percent of our population. I think it is a question of conflicting dangers that we have to work out. The greatest danger of all is that we do not give to every American the feeling and the knowledge that he is being treated the same as every other American.

Senator ERVIN. Well, you are not giving the man the right to have that feeling if he is going to be hailed before a commission or agency of some kind on the complaint of a colored man, but not on the complaint of a white man.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Well, all I can say, Senator, is I am sure the sense of justice and decency which exists and flourishes in every American heart, and within the procedures we have established before our administrative agencies and our courts, that this matter can and will be resolved to the satisfaction of all, so that individual rights are equated with the rights of every individual to be treated the same in the field of housing and in the field of education.

Senator ERVIN. I believe there is something in the Scriptures that says a man looketh upon the outward appearance but God looketh upon the heart.

Don't you think it is rather dangerous to develop an area of law in which men attempt to emulate the example of God and then instead of judging by the outward appearances, judge on the basis of what is hidden in the heart?

Mr. SHIPLEY. I agree with the Senator, but I think it is more dangerous to have Oxfords and Arkansas and Birminghams occurring in Washington and San Francisco and Chicago and New York, and it is coming just as plainly as can be, because there is too large an element of the population involved, and not only the law and the Constitution but the morality itself is involved here, and we look to you as a great Senator, as a great judge, and the others in this great deliberative body to set the policy of this Nation on a course that all of us can adjust to regardless of the consequences.

Senator ERVIN. Frankly, I think that when the law undertakes to judge people, to make a man's livelihood, his right to pursue a livelihood or any other right, dependent upon what some agency judges to be the internal condition of his mind, the law has entered a field where the worst tyranny can be practiced, because I just do not think people are capable of judging those things on the unrevealed, hidden motives which prompt human action.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Well, it is on the frontiers of new thinking that we have to come to a solution. But this country will bless the name of Senator Ervin if you give us leadership in this area, and the Senate will follow you with not only this legislation but other proposals on which you will be holding hearings in a few weeks.

Senator ERVIN. I thank you. But I can assure you from my experience, that I think it is such a hazardous thing to judge people on the basis of their hidden motives rather than their external acts solely, that I am never going to support legislation to allow a man to be

branded a criminal on the basis of what he thinks in his heart when it is not revealed by any certain indicia of his external behavior.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Well, I think the Senator is exactly correct on that. We must do this all within the framework of our established judicial procedures, and authorize these agencies to act only on the record supported by substantial evidence, with the right of appeal to our courts, right on up to the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, but in the end I am sure it will all come out right if we are given the leadership at the national level.

Senator ERVIN. I have enjoyed very much your frank and clear discussion and the very lucid way in which you have presented your

statement.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Senator, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I realize your views are soundly based on the experience of a lifetime and based upon the experience in your own locality, and so on, and you view these things through the colored spectacles, let me say, of this specialized experience of yours.

I am presenting the views of a great urban area with a 55-percent Negro population, and I am expressing the views of a political party that was founded on this concept of equal opportunity for all. We all feel committed sincerely to it, and I hope you will accept my remarks in the spirit in which they were given.

Senator ERVIN. I certainly feel you are entitled to your opinion. Mr. SHIPLEY. Thank you, sir.

Senator ERVIN. I would say as far back as 1883 the Supreme Court of the United States pointed out in a very succinct manner what is the trouble with all of the so-called civil rights laws of modern vintage when it said that there ought to come a time in the advancement of the Negro race when it ceased to be the special favorite of the law and had its rights adjudicated by the same laws by which all other men's rights are adjudicated.

The trouble with all these civil rights proposals that I have seen is that they undertake to ignore that statement of the Supreme Court and undertake to give Negroes special privileges never sought by or granted to any other Americans in our history. I think that is a negation of equality before the law rather than promoting equality before the law.

But I thank you.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Thank you, Senator Ervin.

Senator ERVIN. Do you have some questions?

Senator BAYH. Yes, if Mr. Shipley would not mind. I think it is a healthy sign when our major political parties are interested in one of the major sociological problems of this age.

However, I hope you will agree with me that the issue of civil rights, the protection of basic human rights, is not one of pitting Republicans against Democrats, and that certainly nothing is to be gained for Negroes or any other American by one political party trying to outpromise the other, and ignoring the reality of trying to get things into concrete legislative proposals and get them enacted into law.

I would like, for that reason, if I may, to examine your position relative to the two bills. You state, Mr. Shipley, that a temporary extension of the Commission cannot be justified, and you make much of the fact that this proposal comes from Republican Senators—why Republican versus Democrats I do not know.