Into the Ditch

Mississippi's Governor Paul Johnson, who cannot run for re-election and thus has no need to court the segregationist vote, last month urged his state to comply with the new federal Voting Rights Act. In any event, warned the Governor, "any effort through the courts to obtain relief from this act is unlikely to succeed."

Mississippi's Attorney General Joe Patterson seems not to have been listening. Last week Patterson, who will be up for re-election in 1967, went right ahead with a last-ditch legal fight against the voting law that seemed to be more a campaign gesture than anything else. Filing bills of complaint in chancery courts of four Mississippi counties now under federal registration supervision, he asked for injunctions permitting local officials to reject any voters--federally registered or not--who did not comply with state registration laws. Those laws, which were overwhelmingly approved in a statewide referendum this summer (TIME, Aug. 27), provide that no Mississippian is eligib'e to vote unless he can read and sign his name. This is in direct contradiction to the federal law, which abolishes literacy tests and allows an "X" for a signature.

With predictably oblique logic, Patterson "argued that Mississippi's laws "do not violate anyone's rights under the 15th Amendment, which the Voting Rights Act is predicated and bottomed on " But what of the U.S. doctrine that federal law supersedes state law? US Supreme Court has held many times," said Patterson, "that there is no such thing as a federal elector. The only electors are those qualified in the individual states. We realize Congress has the right to protect individuals under the 15th Amendment. But we don't concede it the right to write the election laws of the state of Mississippi."

By week's end state courts moved to grant Patterson's requests for injunctions. But the Justice Department is fully prepared to take the case into the federal courts. There the last legal ditch will almost certainly be so deep that even the most intransigent Southerner will have to agree that Governor Johnson was right: there is no relief in sight.

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