THE SOUTH Squeezing the Trigger

"Early reports indicate extensive and encouraging voluntary compliance with the new act," began U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. "Regrettably, however, such responsible compliance is neither uniform nor complete." With that, Katzenbach last week ordered federal voting examiners into five more "dead-end" counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi; in all, federal registrars were now at work in 14 Deep South counties that have failed to comply with the new Voting Rights Act. In three of the five new counties, more than 100% of all voting-age whites were on the voting rolls, while as few as 4.6% of the Negroes were registered.

Katzenbach was spurred to action by the fact that while federal examiners were registering an average of 1,900 Negroes a day in the nine counties originally selected for action under the act's "trigger" formula, local registrars elsewhere were still turning away or intimidating most would-be voters.

Police in Mississippi's Amite County pointedly photographed Negroes waiting to register, menacingly asked them who their nearest white neighbors were. In Georgia's Baker County, a civil rights worker was knocked down seven courthouse steps by the sheriff when he brought Negroes in to register. In Mississippi's Oktibbeha County, a Negro woman who asked the sheriff for directions to the courthouse was gruffly told, "We don't let Nigras vote here." The locked door to the registrar's office in Alabama's Lee County bore the sign "Back Sept.1," and the office in Mississippi's Rankin County was closed because the circuit clerk has been "ill." In some counties, local registrars processed whites ahead of Negroes, then slowed to a snail's pace. In others, they let Negroes through the door only to propel them right back out after advising them to come back in 30 days to see if they had passed "the test" -though the new act bars the use of any kind of test to determine voting eligibility.

In Louisiana, Plaquemines Parish Boss Leander Perez urged whites to offset Negro voting gains by "rushing to the registrar's office." His plea had scant effect. In New Orleans, where there are 122,000 unregistered whites, the local registrar one day last week enrolled 386 Negroes -and 14 whites.

Justice Department officials were satisfied that about 50 Southern counties were making some attempt to comply with the law. South Carolina's York County, where more than 600 Negroes were registered by local officials in two days, was a notable example. But in most of the counties in the areas covered by the act -Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and 26 counties in North Carolina -progress was at best glacial. Even so, Katzenbach remained reluctant to order massive federal intervention in the hope that Southern officials would begin to see the light.

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