Negro Registration Will Go Quickly

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30826, 11 August 1965, Page 13

Negro Registration Will Go Quickly

(From FRANK OLIVER, N.Z P A Special Correspondent.) WASHINGTON, August 10. The Deep South will scarcely have time to catch its collective breath before federal officials will be entering the area to register Negroes if local officials do not immediately fulfil the provisions of the Voting Rights Bill signed into law by President Johnson on Friday. For many Southerners this will be insult added to injury.

Southerners are notoriously slow-moving just as they are slow-speaking, and they certainly did not expect the ginger the President put into his determination to implement the bill he signed. The Southern interpretation of the Supreme Court’s “all deliberate speed” in the 1954 desegregation decision has been 12 years of something closely akin to dilly-dally and there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind who knows the South that this idea of speed would be aonlied to the Voting Rights Bill. Instead, action is required within 72 hours —or. That fact marks the difference between the occasion 104 years ago when Lincoln freed the slaves and Friday’s cere-

mony that fulfils the Lincoln promise. Lincoln and his Administration was in no position to enforce the proclamation 104 years ago. Four years of bloody warfare were to follow Lincoln’s signature and it was nine years before a voting rights bill was enacted. The difference today is that this Administration can enforce the new law and the President is determined to enforce it without delay. Political analysts and newspaper commentators are busily speculating about the nossible effects of the bill. The one .ertain thing is that they will be enormous. In the South there will be bitterness among segregationists and particularly officials who firmly believe in segrega-

tlon. There may well be violent reaction. Many Southerners have been bitter all through the voting rights debate. They believe that this legislation is a vindictive bill aimed particularly at them. The situation briefly put is that there are now 44 states which recognise the voting law of 95 years ago and obey it. There are six which still do not. The new bill is to correct that and to do—if necessary by federal force—what the six states have failed to do in 95 years. In the North there is almost universal satisfaction over the President’s warning to Negro leaders and Negroes everywhere that the bill places a challenge before them and a responsibility on them. Friends of the Negro have

been worried by the epidemic of large Negro demonstrations which have led to so much civil disturbance and a measure of violence. Many feel that these demonstrations have done the Negro cause more harm than good by alienating the sympathy of many whites who wish them well. The rank and file among Negroes don’t all have the education or wisdom of their leaders, and it is as unfortunate as it is true that many of them feel they now have the white man on the run and might as well make him run a little harder and a little faster. It should be recorded that not all Northerners feel the new bill is a good one. Manv conservatives have deep reservations about it.