than any President since Lincoln, except Franklin Roosevelt. It is our humble opinion that those who claim that a conservative in any party will supplant Kennedy as President of the United States will have an awakening in the November election of 1964. Two thousand years ago, the good neighbor was he who had compassion. In 1963, a good President is he who shows compassion for the underprivileged and poor of every race under God. Hon. WARREN G. MAGNUSON, Chairman, Committee on Commerce, Washington, D.C. YALE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, MY DEAR SENATOR MAGNUSON: On June 29 and July 15, you kindly invited my views on the constitutional basis for S. 1732, the bill to eliminate discrimination in public accommodations affecting interstate commerce. Much has happened since we corresponded earlier in the summer, and your committee's hearings constitute a record of fundamental value and importance on this and related issues. Apart from my earlier note to you, registering my strong support for the bill, I have joined some other law teachers in a brief statement to Senator Eastland discussing the constitutional foundations for the proposal. And you have received a great deal of persuasive testimony on the constitutionality of the bill under the commerce clause and the 14th amendment. In this letter, therefore, I shall indicate only certain constitutional grounds not mentioned in our joint statement to Senator Eastland-grounds which in my view amply justify vigorous congressional action to help our people make good the constitutional promises we have made, but not kept to our fellow-citizens of Negro blood. I regard the bill before you as part of a process of national education, national awakening, and national action. It should not be viewed as a "solution" for the problem of inequality, but as one step among many toward such a solution. I start with the premise that we can no longer tolerate the revolutionary resistance to law of many officials who have taken oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. With appropriate patience and forbearance, the United States has waited for the slow educative effects of litigation and social change to change men's minds. Meanwhile, we have become accustomed to a pattern of civil disobedience which now approaches open rebellion. We have gradually come to accept the lawlessness of public officials as a normal feature of our life. These men organize, encourage or ignore campaigns of terror against those who would uphold the law-campaigns involving beatings, intimidations, threats, reprisals, bombings, burnings, and even murders for which no one is ever convicted, and almost no one even indicted. They make a mockery of the law in arrangements for voting and choosing jurors, for schools, parks, and other facilities. Thus far, we have temporized with this attitude, and lived with the illusion that we had no choice but to acquiesce in it. It has become our Algeria, as dangerous to public order as the secret war of some officers was to France. Now we are reaping the whirlwind. We see that lawlessness breeds lawlessness. Sustained and bitter white resistance to law has led to dangerous countermeasures. Massive parades in the streets, however disciplined, carry the risk of mob violence. Yet if men who love freedom are denied the vote, and kept off juries; if men who respect themselves are degraded in the labor market and in public accommodations; if, after a century of waiting, we brush aside the Constitution once again, we shall deserve the tragedy of large scale and cumulative civil strife. I hope and believe that this castrophe will no occur-that the good sense and good will of the American people, stirred by the social progress of the Negro, and by the leadership of the Supreme Court, have been mobilized into far-reaching programs of public and private effort which should make 1963 as momentous a year in our moral history as 1863 was. In this perspective, S. 1732 should be viewed as one phase of a far more comprehensive movement, which should include at a minimum prompt and universal protection of the right to vote, by procedures more rapid than those of litigation; the assurance that juries, our ultimate safeguard against tyranny and injustice, truly represent the people; and the opening of public schools to all who would attend them. It is right that Congress take active responsibility for progress. We should no longer rely primarily on the courts for advances in civil rights. The courts have spoken nobly for the law, and for the national conscience. They have started the process of change, and started it superbly. But they do not have and cannot assume executive powers or powers of administration. In any event, we know that the law in action is far behind that announced by the Supreme Court, and that fact is a reproach to all of us who share responsibility for the state of the law. An explosion of feeling has now transformed the race problem in American life, and given it new dimensions, and new urgency. That change in opinion now requires political, administrative, and executive action on a very large scale to transform the situation by vindicating the law. Many areas of the struggle for law in our public arrangements are crucial, including those dealt with by S. 1732. In approaching its work on this front, I recommend that the Congress seriously consider a neglected source of authority as one of many available foundations for its action. I refer to what has well been called "the sleeping giant of the Constitution," the clause in article IV, section 4, which provides, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government." Whatever powers the guarantee clause may give the courts and of course that question is controversial-there can be no controversy about the momentous obligation it imposes on the President and on the Congress. No one now knows the outer limits of the clause. I submit, however, that a State whose government disenfranchises half its citizens of voting age, keeps Negroes off juries, and otherwise remains in a posture of complete defiance of law does not possess a republican form of government, in any possible meaning of the term. Facing these facts, and the responsibility of Congress and the President under the guarantee clause, let us remember the spirit of Cromwell before the Long Parliament, and of the Unionists who sustained President Lincoln. I do not doubt the power to prevail of those deep, almost mystical national instincts which preserved the Union a century ago. But the time has come to invoke them, and to allow the memory of those great events to order men's thoughts and actions. Yours sincerely, Hon. WARREN G. MAGNUSON, EUGENE V. ROSTOW. UNITED CHURCH, BOARD FOR HOMELAND MINISTRIES, Chairman, Senate Commerce Committee, DEAR SENATOR: I am writing to you in regard to the current civil rights legislation which is now in the process of hearings before your committee. I want to encourage you to do whatever you can to speed up and to see to the passage of this legislation. The United Church of Christ is a denomination of 2 million members spread throughout the country. There is a significant Negro constituency in this denomination. As a matter of fact the Congregational Churches which are part of the United Church of Christ have for a century been engaged in Negro education and in a variety of projects on behalf of the civil rights of Negroes. The particular responsibility I carry is for the education in churches of children, youth, and adults; and it is our intense concern that every possible vestige of segregation and of injustice and disenfranchisement of our Negro fellows be stripped away by the action of all good citizens. It is our belief that essential to that end is the Federal civil rights legislation which will unmask and deny legal support to the structures and systems of segregation which are so thoroughly involved. At the most recent meeting of our national body, the general synod, major steps were taken to try and put our own house in order in regard to our practice and efforts on behalf of civil rights. We have made major pronouncements and serious efforts in this regard in the past, but this summer marks a new departure in our efforts to speed up the achievement of serious justice for all of our Negro brethren. I shall appreicate hearing from you as to your belief about the potential passage of this legislation and will be interested to know your position in regard to it, Sincerely yours, о EDWARD A. POWERS, |