Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Attorney General KENNEDY. Yes; I believe that is true, but may I just add, any Attorney General could already do that under statutes that are already on the books. He could present cases to grand juries against those he does not like, he could bring antitrust cases against companies and corporations which do not support his party politically. He already has very wide authority and if he abuses the authority, he can cause great harm to individuals, companies, and

to the United States.

Senator ERVIN. And I believe charges have been made to the effect that the Attorney General during the Harding administration did precisely that; is that not right?

Attorney General KENNEDY. That is right.

Senator ERVIN. In my judgment, the best test of the wisdom of enacting a legislative proposal into law is not what a good man can do with it, but on the contrary, what a bad man could do with it. Consequently, I do not believe that Congress should create any discretionary legal powers to be used or not used according to the caprice or the whim or the good intentions or the bad intentions of either a good man or a bad man who may happen to be the temporary occupant of a public office.

I am very much disturbed by the provisions of this bill which begin with section 301 on page 18 and end with section 306 on page 23. These are the sections which vest powers in the Federal Commissioner of Education. If I have counted correctly, these sections make eight different references to racially imbalanced schools or to the problems of racially imbalanced schools.

Is it your position that the powers conferred upon the Attorney General to bring school desegregation cases include the power to bring school desegregation cases to achieve desegregation in what may be called racially imbalanced schools?

Attorney General KENNEDY. No; I do not think we have that authority.

Senator ERVIN. Is there anything in these sections dealing with the Federal Commissioner of Education which defines what a racially imbalanced school is?

Attorney General KENNEDY. I do not believe so, Senator.

Senator ERVIN. I could not find anywhere in this bill any definition of what constitutes a racially imbalanced school. Does not this bill leave the definition of the meaning of this term as well as what should be done with reference to racially imbalanced schools to the imagination of the Federal Commissioner of Education uncontrolled by any law?

Attorney General KENNEDY. Well, I think in general the people of a community know whether they have a problem of this kind or not. Under the provisions of the bill, if they feel that they have a problem concerning racially imbalanced schools on which they need some help, they can request it. The Commissioner acts only when he receives a request from a particular school district.

Senator, I think that over the period of the last 8 or 9 years, there has been a good deal of attention focused on the South and the segregation of the public schools in the South, without looking particularly at the North and the fact that de facto segregation exists there.

I think in the last 2 years people in the North have started examining what their problems are and are realizing the fact that there is de facto segregation in some school districts in some of our major

northern communities.

What should be done about it-whether steps should be taken to move pupils from one school to another, for example, is a question of real concern to many school districts and communities.

This bill is an effort, therefore, to focus attention on that problem, to try to coordinate the best knowledge and information and give aid and assistance to those school districts which are trying to solve a major difficulty.

I have read in the last week, in the northern metropolitan papers, that there is great concern in these areas about racial imbalance in schools and what, if anything, should be done about it. This bill is an effort to try to take some action on a coordinated basis to deal with that problem, if there is a request from a particular school district. Senator ERVIN. I noticed a newspaper comment upon the provisions of title III authorizing the Federal Commissioner of Education to make grants or loans to school boards to induce them to desegregate schools. The comment was to the effect that such grants or loans would constitute an offer by the Federal Commissioner to pay bribes to school boards for complying with the law as laid down in the school desegregation case.

Attorney General KENNEDY. What paper was that?

Senator ERVIN. The Greensboro Daily News of Greensboro, N.C., had a comment of this character in an editorial of June 21, 1963. It said: "Bribes for obeying the law strike us as the ultimate debasement of free government."

Attorney General KENNEDY. I do not know where the Greensboro News got their information.

Senator ERVIN. I imagine from the bill. The bill gives the Federal Commissioner of Education discretionary power to make grants and loans to school districts for the purposes specified in the bill.

Attorney General KENNEDY. Senator, first we have to go back again to recognizing that there is a problem. I think you would agree that there is a problem.

Senator ERVIN. I think a very serious problem is created when the proposal is made that a child ought to be denied the right to go to his neighborhood school and placed on a bus and transported to some other community merely for the purpose of making a school in the other community a "racially balanced school." I think that raises a very serious problem and I think it violates the 14th amendment.

Attorney General Kennedy. I understand that and I know there is an argument in that direction. But may I just say, that whether we can agree or not, there is a problem. There are many communities that feel there is a problem, whether it is New York or Detroit or Chicago or Los Angeles, or any other communities which have a high percentage of minority groups and where many of the schools do in fact serve only particular races of students. They are attempting now to try to determine whether anything needs to be done or should be done to meet that problem.

There was an exceptionally good editorial, I think, in the Washington Star about 3 weeks ago which pointed up this difficulty.

So this is an effort, Senator, to try to help. That is all it does. It is a problem and we are trying to help.

Senator ERVIN. I hope that the editorial mentioned by you was the editorial which appeared in the Washington Evening Star on June 25, 1963, and which was entitled "Racial Imbalance in the Schools." I say this because the editorial writer said: "The concept of a homogenized school system, in which the community is scientifically shaken up to provide an 'ideal' social mix, is not only unworkable-it is philosophically unsound.”

Attorney General KENNEDY. I do not think that is the whole editorial.

Senator ERVIN. No; that is not the whole editorial. But so that we may have the benefit of the whole editorial, I will ask unanimous consent to insert it in the record at this point.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you want it copied in the record or made an appendix?

Senator ERVIN. I would rather have it copied in the record, so people other than the Attorney General and myself, who did not have the benefit of reading this, can read it. I also ask that this editorial which appeared in the Greensboro Daily News, of Greensboro, N.C., on June 21, 1963, be printed in the record at this point. (The editorials referred to follow :)

[From the Evening Star, of Washington, D.C., June 25, 1963]

RACIAL IMBALANCE IN THE SCHOOLS

In the best of all possible worlds, there is no question but that the best school environment for Negro children would be one in which the students are of varied racial, cultural, economic, and religious backgrounds. It is equally clear that such an environment does not result automatically from meeting the letter of the school integration law.

This is what the education commissioner of New York State had in mind when he directed last week that integration is not enough; that racial imbalance also must be eliminated from public schools of the State. It was not a new idea, of course. A similar point, for instance, lay behind recent demonstrations by Negroes in Englewood, N.J. But the commissioner called for drastic action in New York. And for purposes of carrying out the order, he proposed to define a racially imbalanced school as one having 50 percent or more Negro pupils enrolled.

Whatever may be said for his motives, Commissioner Allen is playing an absurd numbers game. By his own admission, the cutoff ratio of 50 percent Negroes in any school is an arbitrary figure, selected because "we had to have some definition" of imbalance. The mounting reaction, moreover, demonstrates the futility of his action. The difficulty of enforcing such a policy in New York City schools, according to Calvin E. Gross, the city school superintendent, would be insuperable. He characterizes the problem of transporting students under such a plan as unbelievable. To meet Dr. Allen's definition, racial balances would have to be changed in 235 elementary schools in the city alone. Negro leaders, who generally applauded the directive, have conceded the impossibility of its total application. The extreme example of the unworkability of this proposal is to imagine its fate in Washington. With an overall ratio of only 15 percent white pupils in public schools, the best balance Washington could possibly achieve if all the white students were distributed equally throughout the city would be 85 percent Negro in each school. The fact is, of course, that the ratio would go even higher, for such a policy would serve only to chase additional white families to the suburbs. No one would benefit.

The concept of a homogenized school system, in which the community is scientifically shaken up to provide an “ideal”" social mix, is not only unworkable—it is philosophically unsound. The right position is that race should not be a factor in pupil assignment; once that principle is abandoned, an ethical Pandora's box

opens up. It is better to stick to the time-proved concept that neighborhood schools should reflect the neighborhoods which they serve.

Where "legal segregation" in schools exists in cities such as Washington and New York, the answer does not lie in frantic artificial devices which attempt to make our schools shoulder all the burdens of the community. It lies in the case of Washington, for example in the attraction of more whites to the central city, and the accompanying spread of a part of the central city Negro population to the suburbs. The factors which eventually will accomplish these things also are clear: Urban renewal, the elimination of discrimination in housing, fuller employment, improvements in the economic status of the Negro-most of all, the growth of understanding and social maturity.

These are not the fast or easy means. But so far as we know they are the only means by which a realistic attack on this problem can be made.

[From the Greensboro (N.C.) Daily News of June 21, 1963]

CIVIL RIGHTS IN AN OLD HAT

After an overture of weeks, against the backdrop of gathering national crises in race relations, President Kennedy's new civil rights proposals might have been expected to rival in scope the tablet of stone from Sinai.

But aside from a few palatible elements the five-point program the President sent to Congress Wednesday is a disappointing mixture that couples unwarranted severity with unprecedented sweep.

To be sure, a few of the measures are due and harmless. Any well-conceived program to train displaced Negroes would be welcome. Eastern North Carolina knows the dimensions of this problem as well as any part of the country; and on the economic front, which is the real key to orderly racial advance, there cannot be too much emphasis.

Also, we would join the President in wishing the Civil Rights Commission preserved.

We remain chary of legislation under the commerce clause of the Constitution that would in effect strip away the right of a restaurant, theater, or motel or hotel owner to discriminate. Once it is established by law that the sale of goods carried across State lines bars discrimination, the vital distinction between public and private would hang by a slender thread-the vague distinction as to the degree of public involvement.

Without the most careful debate about the long-range implications, we are reluctant to see the right of a property owner to be protected against trespass compromised. Admittedly, it sometimes is imperative to rescue property from stubborn and wilful self-immolation, and if the law is to be changed we would repeat here our preference that it be changed by carefully composed legislation rather than by court decision.

Other features of the President's program admit of less debate:

This

The proposal to allow the Justice Department to file suits on its own motion against school boards and colleges to end segregation is a retread of the discredited title 4 which the Justice Department removed, at President Eisenhower's shocked insistence, from civil rights legislation more than 5 years ago. device would require the hiring of a battery of lawyers of unforeseeable size; and it would open the door to a form of busy-body interferences with local authority as it deals with the ticklish problems of desegregation. At its worst it would sap the local initiative by which alone matters that affect local communities so intimately as school policy can be handled.

The other claw of the pincer-a proposal to subsidize school districts that voluntarily desegregate-is an ignoble resort to bribery to accomplish what decent Americans will eventually accomplish because it is just and because supreme law requires it. Bribes for obeying the law strike us as the ultimate debasement of free government. How much is it going to be worth to refrain from murder and theft?

The request for legislation "to make it clear that the Federal Government is not required *** to furnish financial help to a program or an activity in which racial discrimination occurs," unless we mistake it, embodies the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's foolish proposal that Mississippi be punished economically for "defying" the Constitution.

One is, frankly, left mystified by the President's own about-face. When the Civil Rights Commission proposed pocketbook penalties for Mississippi, Mr. Kennedy emphatically dissociated himself from the scheme, pleading that the move (even if constitutional) would be of doubtful wisdom and morality. Why does the President seek general permission to use a form of economic blackmail he refused-rightly—to use as late as 2 months ago?

On voting rights, there can of course be no compromise with principle. But the President submits two measures of very dubious value. One would enable "Federal referees" to give priority on court dockets to voting cases; but with most of the court dockets of the country jammed, who is to say that justice for all will be served by arbirarily giving voting cases pride of place?

And as for the proposal that a sixth grade education be considered prima facie evidence of "literacy," it is a patently absurd mockery of the idea of literacy and we have so stated before.

As a package, the President's civil rights proposals are unimaginative and indeed old hat. But their greatest collective fault is that they would endow Federal officials—in the name of the noble cause of racial justice-with sweeping and unheralded authority to intrude in almost every nook of local life-superseding home authority, discouraging such voluntary effort as is encouragingly evident all over North Carolina and other States, and generally tempting those who should be thinking and working to think only of the mañana when Coxey's army of Federal officials will descend to do our work.

"An explosive national problem," so said the President Wednesday, "cannot await city-by-city solutions." Whoever believes that believes that the political fabric of the country is rotten. Mr. Kennedy does not himself believe it, or he would not have been urging voluntary action on local businessmen, clergymen, and editors, who have been visiting Washington in great droves recently.

If "city-by-city solutions" are impossible-and of course Greensboro and Charlotte and Raleigh and many other communities across the South are learning that they are indeed very possible the outlook is bleak. What local authority cannot do, it is fanciful to think that the Federal Government, with some massive bureaucratic wisdom, can do better.

Senator ERVIN. Mr. Attorney General, I have voted on several occasions for financial aid to public schools in the belief that the Federal Government would permit the schools to remain free from Federal control, but I will have to admit that this bill shakes my faith.

In the first place, it gives the Attorney General discretionary power where the conditions described in the bill exist to initiate actions which would result in assignment of pupils by race at the dictation of the Federal Government in every school district in the United States. Attorney General KENNEDY. Senator, that is not correct.

Senator ERVIN. Well, let me put on one more sentence and then I will hear your response.

Where there has been a "failure of the school board to achieve desegregation."

Now, what is incorrect in that statement?

Attorney General KENNEDY. As I understood it, you said, Senator, it was up to the Attorney General

Senator ERVIN. I did not say that.

Attorney General KENNEDY. I did not finish.

Senator ERVIN. I said it gave the Attorney General the discretionary power to initiate proceedings in court where the conditions set out in this bill exist to ask the Federal courts to take charge of the assignment of students to schools by race in every school district in the United States where there has been, to use the words of the bill, "a failure of the school board to achieve desegregation."

Attorney General KENNEDY. Yes. I did not hear, Senator, that part of it that dealt with the courts.

This, of course, is a decision by the courts, not by the Attorney General.

« AnteriorContinuar »