At Last, A Vote

Only five Senators were in the chamber when a well-dressed, goateed Negro jumped up in the gallery and shouted: "How can you say you are protecting the black man if only five are here? I thought this was America, the land of the free. This involves 20 million people." Guards moved in, took the man off for mental tests.

Had the Senate's critic showed up just two days later, he might have been happier. Now the chamber was jammed with huddling, whispering Senators. What was up? Unbelievably, a vote. Having consumed 32 days and some 3,000,000 words on the civil rights bill without getting anywhere, the Senate was about to vote for the first time on amendments.

Double Defeat. Four had been offered, dealing with jury trials in criminal-contempt-of-court cases. The first to be considered came from Kentucky Republican Thruston Morton. It required that juries be empaneled for all criminal contempt suits arising under the bill. Ordinarily on the side of the angels in civil rights matters, Morton now found himself being privately accused by some civil rights advocates of just trying to show the folks back home that he knew who buttered his hoe-cakes every six years.

The first vote ended in a 45-45 tie, which meant defeat. To nail it down, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield moved a reconsideration. On that vote, the amendment lost again. Later that night, the Senate debated and defeated, 74 to 19, Kentucky Republican John Sherman Cooper's plan to require juries except in cases where local and state officials are defendants. That left two more jury amendments. One, sponsored jointly by Mansfield and Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, would limit jury trials to violations that carried penalties of more than 30 days in jail and $300 fines. The other, offered by Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge, would require juries in all criminal contempt suits, whatever law they violated. Votes on both were postponed to this week. The Senate resumed talking.

A Bit of Purifying. Almost daily, Dirksen was huddling with key Republicans and liberal Democrats, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Justice Department lawyers. Explained Ev: "I'm trying to unscrew the inscrutable." That meant reaching some sort of agreement on some 70 amendments that the Republicans want passed in return for help in shutting off a threatened Southern gabfest.

Most of the amendments were technical--Massachusetts Republican Leverett Saltonstall called them "purifying." But a few, like Dirksen's long-awaited changes to the bill's public-accommodations section, were of great substantive importance. Dirksen's plan would bar the Attorney General from originating suits and seeking court injunctions against businessmen who resist serving Negroes. Kennedy objected, argued that unless the Government could initiate suits where discrimination was a way of life, the accommodations law would lose most of its punch. At week's end both sides retired to work on new drafts of the Dirksen plan, to be thrashed out when the conferences resumed this week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.