where the law touches life in public matters, we are to be treated in terms of individual merit or demerit, not in terms of irrelevant membership in accidental groups.

It means that only reasonable and relevant classifications are admissible in law. This is our unfinished business, both at home and in respect of our leadership of the free nations abroad.

We must achieve equal treatment for Negroes in the North's publichousing developments, as well as in the South's public schools; we must achieve equal treatment by the police and the courts for Puerto Ricans in New York, Mexican-Americans in the southwest, and citizens of Asiatic extraction on the Pacific coast; we must achieve equal treatment for American Indians in their negotiations with the Department of the Interior, and for Jews in their access to medical schools and hotels.

To complete this unfinished business, in the spirit of recent fine decisions by the courts and executive agencies in the fields of education, transportation, and other public facilities, we need to use various methods and at various speeds.

Legislative, executive, and judicial actions, on local, State, and Federal levels, should be used severally or in one combination or another, depending on the specific job to be done and its particular circumstances; so should the manifold types of private effort, organized and unorganized, by which much of our past progress has been achieved. The most important thing is to move toward the goal as quickly and surely as we can, with an accurate sense of what each specific job requires at any given moment.

It is the view of the American Civil Liberties Union that the specific job of protecting the right to vote requires at this moment the new Federal legislation embodied in S. 3718 and S. 903. We are fully aware that civil liberties depend in great measure on observance of the principles of the 9th and 10th amendments safeguarding the residual rights of the States and the people against Federal power.

For my own comfort, Mr. Chairman, I should be happy if there were no larger economic enterprise than the Miner's Bank of Joplin, Mo., in which I grew up and I should be more comfortable if the Federal Government would be no more sizable than it was when I was a freshman at University of Pennsylvania when I came down here on March 4, 1951, for Inauguration Day. This is baying at the moon. We are talking about a more complicated life and society than that which existed and might be more comfortable for me.

Not only are the 9th and 10th amendments in the Federal Constitution but the 15th amendment as in the Federal Constitution.

The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Except for the first amendment rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition, there is no right more basic to citizenship in a free society under a democratic government than the right to vote; indeed, it is practically indispensable to make the first amendment rights really effective.

And there is no worse denial or abridgment of that right either than interference with its exercise by threat to life or any other form of coercion.

Therefore, when a State widely and regularly denies or abridges that right—either directly, or indirectly through allowing such interference-it fails in an elementary responsibility to the people and the Federal Government, who are mentioned with such affection in the 9th and 10th amendments as the residual source of our power and our Government-must discharge that constitutional responsibility to them.

The more I have worked abroad, the more I have worked here, having come to think of the Bill of Rights as much more than an arid legal document which I used not to be able even to recite, the more I have come to feel that plain symbols are vitally significant. There is no plainer symbol by which people in a democracy, especially those on the rise from erstwhile underprivileged status, judge their society and their government, or by which outsiders, friends and enemies abroad judge sincerity and success, than the opportunity to vote without permanent danger. We cannot risk further delay in removing that danger.

It is also the view of the American Civil Liberties Union that new Federal legislation is required at this moment by the other specific job of reducing tension while continuing to remove discrimination.

I am not for peace at any price. I am for peace with justice. This is the hardest of all human problems to solve. We have to reduce tension while continuing to remove discrimination.

Man does not live by judicial decisions alone. The divided Supreme Court decision in 1857 in the Dred Scott case, giving slavery its most extreme sanction in legality, did not settle the question of slavery in fact. Nor will the unanimous Supreme Court decisions of 1954 and 1955 in the public school integration cases, admirable though we believe them to be in giving emancipation its most comprehensive sanction in legality, settle the whole question of discrimination in fact.

As a man who grew up on the southern edge of the border State of Missouri, and who still has spontaneous and intense compassion for everybody-white and Negro-on both sides of the most tragic line ever drawn in our history, I am confident that there will not be another intersectional war.

The South will not secede, the North will not send troops to enforce the law; the experience of common nationhood since 1856 has gone too deep. But even well short of war, there will be much bitter trouble; and we need some new techniques for reducing it, while completing our unfinished business-in all sections of the country.

I spent the summer of 1937 helping to start Quaker relief work on both sides of the Spanish Civil War. This was an outgrowth of the fact that I am half an English Quaker whose family came here in 1680 and half an Irish Catholic whose family came here from the famine and the terror, and in Spain in the summer of 1937, I became acquainted more than I ever had personally been before with what the adherents and the exponents of quick and final, extremist and authoritarian solutions on both sides of that conflict were doing to those caught between, the small-business men, the small farmers and the small professional class which was prevailingly attached to democratic government. I thought all over again in 1861 in this country when there were quick and final, extremist and authoritarian solutions offered on both sides of a conflict and in which were caught, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and 600,000 dead and all of us in the recon

struction period and all of us since. We have this inheritance to cope with, and there has always been great difficulty for people in a free society under a democratic government to realize that what democracy offers as opposed to quick and final and extremist and authoritarian solutions is simply the opportunity to go on working.

And what I plead for today is a new manifestation in Federal legislation of the opportunity to go on working through tension reducing methods which will nonetheless produce advances in the final removal of discrimination.

There is nothing magical about an investigation commission.

I don't want to shock you by news, but this is my conviction. There is nothing magical about an investigating commission.

It may be perverted into substitute for action, or into a louder than ever sounding board for irresponsible argument.

But those are risks worth taking for a new opportunity to make a sober assessment of practices, in any part of the country, which constitute a denial of equal protection of the laws; and to appraise the laws and policies of the Federal Government, with respect to that constitutional guaranty.

We are all inseparably together in having this unfinished business on our hands, and using the method of a specialized commissionsteadily at work for 2 years should teach us a lot about one another's hopes and problems, and about practical ways and means.

Accordingly we support S. 3605 and S. 907. I think it is correct to say that the next 50 years will show that the North is more nearly like the South in the problem of relations between Negro and white than it has been at any time since the Civil War, perhaps than at any time since 1908 when the international slave trade was stopped constitutionally, perhaps even that at any time since 1819 when the first slaves were introduced at Jamestown. There is Negro migration into the North. There are higher Negro birth rates than white birth rates in the big northern cities; and there is thus intensified competition between Negro groups and very recently arisen white minority groups in those big cities, competition for jobs and housing and schooling and recreational facilities.

I look for two keys to the problem. In great measure in the South, the problem of progress while reducing tension is in the hands of the white Protestant churches around which Southern society centers. In the North the contribution to the national solution of this national problem will be less by preachment and more by example in dealing with its own relations between white and Negro. In that spirit I support the device of an investigation commission.

Another method by which we may reduce tension while accelerating the achievement of equal protection of the laws is to make its enforcement proportionally more a matter of preventive civil action and proportionally less a matter of criminal punishment.

Accordingly we support S. 3717 and S. 905.

It's not astonishing that many local citizens, who compose even Federal grand and trial juries, regularly refuse to indict or convict their friends and neighbors official or private-for offenses which they themselves at least condone. But no self-respecting government, constitutionally responsible for seeing that even its humbles citizens have equal protection of the laws, can let things rest there. Hence, it would seem to serve both wisdom and conscience to have the Federal

Government empowered to ask a Federal judge for the declaratory relief of an injunction against a threatened violation of a civil right. If the injunction was disobeyed, the judge coud cite the violator for contempt of court, whose punishment while not severe, is real.

Measurable success in this method of making equal protection of the laws proportionally more a matter of preventive civil action, and proportionally less a matter of criminal punishment, will depend a good deal on the quantity and quality of the work which the Department of Justice can do.

Senator HENNINGS. I understood you to say you supported both S. 905 and S. 3717.

Mr. MALIN. That is right.

Senator HENNINGS. The bill that the Constitutional Rights Subcommittee has reported is S. 905.

Mr. MALIN. 905?

Senator HENNINGS. It provides alternative punishment.

Mr. MALIN. Right.

Senator HENNINGS. It amends and supplements existing law but provides additional criminal penalties, but it also gives the United States court concurrent jurisdiction with State courts to enforce civil action against violators.

Mr. MALIN. Right.

I want both. I prefer it to S. 3717. I want all this and Heaven too. I will take all this if I can't get Heaven.

Senator HENNINGS. I see your point, Mr. Malin. I think it is very well taken. We are just trying to explore here. You would prefer that there be no criminal provisions or you would prefer that there be alternative provisions relating to both civil action and criminal action if civil action is ineffective or otherwise inoperative?

Mr. MALIN. Both, but I know that the thing we have not had is the possibility of actions via civil preventive action.

Senator HENNINGS. Yes, 905 provides for both.

Mr. MALIN. That's right.

Senator HENNINGS. S. 3717 has no criminal provisions.

Mr. MALIN. Yes. I feel that way about the point you raised earlier in talking with Mr. Wilkins about the Civil Rights Division and the new Assistant Attorney General. I want a Civil Rights Division; I want a new Assistant Attorney General. I do not think-here I differ from an earlier witness-I do not think that the problem resides chiefly in the number of lawyers at work on this task.

The status of the top lawyer matters greatly. United States attorneys throughout the country are subject to Senate confirmaion. The head of the present section on civil rights in the Department of Justice, like the head of any other section merely is not subject to Senate. confirmation.

Senator HENNINGS. That is true.

Mr. MALIN. And this difference in status matters in intradepartmental relations. So I want a new Assistant Attorney General. I want a new division. But I know that the meat of all of this will finally be what use the new Assistant Attorney General and the division make of their leadership in the handling of cases, district by district in cooperation with the district attorneys.

So it seems most logical to create a Civil Rights Division to be headed by an Assistant Attorney General. Accordingly, we support S. 3604 and S. 902.

All in all these proposals appear to the American Civil Liberties Union to be something practical which can be done now. It does not need lengthy hearings.

Senator HENNINGS. Thank you, sir.

I did not mean to say thank you, because you are finished. thank you for your further elucidation on that point.

I mean

Mr. MALIN. I have not spent as long a life as I have in hearing and delivering talks not to realize that terminal facilities are one of the most important facilities.

Senator HENNINGS. For your information, our committee reported out four bills.

I called them up in Judiciary. It was then suggested by another Senator that there be hearings before the full committee.

This is presumably a hearing before the full Judiciary Committee. Mr. MALIN. The quality is high.

Senator HENNINGS. I shall say that of the witnesses indeed.

I assure you that I am not one to advocate lengthy protracted hearings either. That is why we reported these out on the 6th of February. We want to get action.

Mr. MALIN. I will settle for prompt enactment by both Houses of Congress in nonpartisan if you will, fulfillment of the President's recommendation for the short-run and long-run good of us all. Senator HENNINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Malin.

Mr. Young, have you any comments to make?

Mr. YOUNG. No.

Senator HENNINGS. You made a great contribution to our deliberations. Thank you.

Now, our next witness seems to be Mr. David H. Scull, representing the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

Mr. Scull, will you come forward and be seated?

COMMITTEE

STATEMENT OF DAVID H. SCULL, FRIENDS COMMITTEE ON

NATIONAL LEGISLATION

Senator HENNINGS. We will be very glad to have you proceed in your own manner. Do you have a prepared statement?

Mr. SCULL. I thought I would try to condense my written statement a little bit in order not to take up the time of this committee

Senator HENNINGS. You are very considerate, sir. We do have some other duties this afternoon and evening. We will be very glad to hear from you, sir, in any manner that you are pleased to convey your thoughts.

Mr. SCULL. My name is David Scull. I am a businessman, from Annandale, Va., and am representing today the Friends Committee on National Legislation-not as an official spokesman for our Society, but trying to convey the idea that our religious belief has something to say on such vital questions of legislation as this.

I think on this legislation we are discussing today, the views we are presenting are widely shared by American Quakers, and indeed by religious-minded Americans generally.