Right to Speak

Horace Julian Bond is a young man who likes to speak his mind. As it hap pens, some of the things that Bond, 26, a Negro pacifist and civil rights worker, has on his mind -sympathy for draft-card burners and extreme opposition to the war in Viet Nam - proved highly unpalatable to the Georgia house of representatives. Twice this year house members voted against allowing him to sit among them as the duly elected member from Atlanta's 136th Legisla tive District.

Last week the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Georgia house violated Bond's First Amendment guar antee of freedom of speech by refusing to grant him his seat. The right to make such statements as Bond's "I admire the courage of anyone who burns his draft card" would not be denied a private citizen, wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in the court's decision. All the more should they not be denied a legislator, who has, in fact, a duty to speak out on controversial questions so that his constituents can know where he stands.

That is a duty that the boyishly handsome Bond (he once modeled for Royal Crown Cola posters) is unlikely to shirk. The son of the dean of Atlanta University's school of education, Bond was publicity director of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee until last September, and has been an articulate advocate and organizer of the New Left. For much of the past year, he has supported his wife and three children by writing and lecturing, now has a book in the works on his rebuffs by the legislature. Title: A Georgia House Is Not a Home.

Clear-Cut Violation. As a result of last week's decision, Bond will get $2,000 in lost pay from the last session, can also expect $5,200 in pay and expenses from the upcoming session. By doggedly challenging the hostile sentiment of the legislature, Bond has guaranteed the basic right of unpopular legislators, both Negro and white. He will not be alone in the Georgia legislature: ten other Negroes were elected last month, and none of them has been challenged.

Either way it ruled, the court was bound to set a precedent. If it did nothing, legislatures would have a green light to keep out or effectively inhibit all dissenters. Yet if it overruled the Georgia house, it would move the judiciary -if only tentatively -into a hitherto sacrosanct area of legislative prerogative. No court, either federal or state, had ever before overruled the right of a legislature to judge the qualifications of its own members. The Bond case involved such a clear-cut violation of freedom of speech, however, that the precedent set by the court may have only limited applicability. The court is likely to step warily into more complicated problems of legislative prerogative. Without question, too, state legislatures will henceforth hesitate before barring or expelling members without very good cause.

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