Americans Await Action On Racial Riots Issue

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31624, 9 March 1968, Page 19

Americans Await Action On Racial Riots Issue

(From FRANK OLIVER, N.Z.P.A. special correspondent)

WASHINGTON, March 7. The report by the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders on the riots of last summer scared the average American, and apparently a few senators, too, enough to make them perform what is generally regarded in the Senate as a mortal sin—vote to cut off a filibuster.

Three times a vote of clossure was called and three times it failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority. In planning for a fourth vote, Senator Mike Mansfield was making history, for never had a fourth vote of closure been asked for to stop a filibuster. And it is clear the fourth would have failed, too, if the publication of the commission had not come between the third and fourth votes. Now, no Senator can talk for more than an hour on the Civil Rights Bill, which provides for open housing—and this, to all intents and purposes, means that at the end of a possible 100 hours of debate the 1968 Civil Rights Bill will become law, for if there is a two-thirds majority for closure there exists the simple majority needed for. it to become law.

Thus, in a way, those riots of last summer have won the Negro a small victory: the right to live where he pleases as long as he can afford to pay the cost. Discrimination in housing should soon be at an end.

“The report of the commission splits the darkness like

a flash of lightning,” says the “Washington Post,” while the “New York Times” says it must have an effect on all Americans as electrifying as the summer riots that brought the commission into being. “Its importance is that it tells the truth with stark candour, exposing the hideous cancer of racial discrimination and injustice which must be excised from the American system,” comments the “Post.” Adds “The Times”: “It is a warning that total national commitment and sacrifice in the cause of genuine racial equality is the price of America’s survival as a society built on order and justice.” The commission’s report makes it clear to all Americans that the time is getting late.

One researcher has come across a quotation; “The relation of whites and Negroes in the United States is our most grave and perplexing domestic problem.” But this was no reference to last summer’s riots; it is culled from the report of a Chicago commission written 45 years ago after the Chicago race riot that left 38 dead, 537 injured and more than 1000 people homeless.

That report of 45 years ago recommended measures to assure urban Negroes of greater employment opportunities, open housing, less labour union discrimination, improved police protection, and better education. It went further. It urged that the sale and possession of firearms be controlled by the most stringent means possible. It said the times were dangerous and condemned both coloured and white militant racialism.

One newspaper asks whether this report has come in time to prevent this summer a repetition of the tragedies so many cities witnessed last year. “Little time is left and little has been learned from the experiences of the summers that have passed,” says another. The solutions the commission points to are widely regarded as obvious, but not easy to achieve. It says bluntly the programmes needed will require unprecedented levels of financial support and

performance, and it adds: “There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience.”

No longer is it a question of guns and butter, but of guns, butter and enormous appropriations to get the Negro out of the basement of the American economy. The times are still dangerous, even more dangerous than they were 45 years ago, and one newspaper, referring to that Chicago report, asks: “What will we learn from the report issued last week-end?” What some sections of the press are saying is that the Chicago report of 45 years ago shows that reports of themselves do not automatically bring changes, no matter who makes them or who signs them; that it takes will power and, in the words of one newspaper, “a painfullypractical follow-through.” It could be added that it also takes a lot of money, and the amounts being spoken about are not in sight. One side effect of the riots report is that it may persuade the House to do something about the oft-requested tax surcharge. But the proceeds of that are, if they materialise, to reduce an expected Budget deficit from “gigantic” to “enormous”, and not to deal with the evils of which the commission reports. There is a chorus of suggestions that the time is more than ripe for a re-ordering of priorities in Washington, especially from those voices and newspapers which think far too much is going into the Vietnam war and far too little into urgent domestic problems.

The “New York Times” says bluntly that there should be a turn towards a de-escalation of the war in Vietnam and an escalation of the war against poverty and discrimination at home, because there is little prospect of effective local action without a strong initiative from the White House and from Congress.

Many eyes are turned towards both places in the expectation of leadership. The importance of the report for many thinking Americans is that this marks the first time that a group

of American leaders not professionally connected with the race issue have plunged into the social and psychological thickets of the American dilemma.

The nation’s leadership faces no easy road. The chief cause of the riots last summer, the commission found, lay in “the racial attitude of white Americans towards black Americans.” Intolerant attitudes of white towards black and black towards white are never easy to expunge, especially on a national scale and especially in a very large nation of 200 million people.