For Whom the Bell Tolls

In the Texas legislature last week two senators turned the South's prime weapon against civil-rights legislation, the filibuster, to a novel use. Up from the lower house swept a rash of school segregation bills, and in an effort to stop them the protesting pair put on the longest filibuster in Texas history.

Filibuster leader was San Antonio's Henry Gonzalez, 41, the first Texan of Mexican parentage to be elected to the state senate since 1892. Alternating with Laredo's Abraham Kazen Jr., 38, Freshman Senator Gonzalez (who perfected his speech as a child by practicing with pebbles in his mouth, "like Demosthenes") ranged the course of world history and literature to flesh out his marathon talk. Quoting hugely from Herodotus, the Prophet Jeremiah, John Donne and many another classic, he dazzled his colleagues --and almost wore them down--with his panegyric on freedom and on the crucial need for racial equality.

Deftly Gonzalez needled his state-proud colleagues for borrowing the first of the bills--which would, in effect, permit school boards to assign pupils on a racial basis--from "lesser states." "Texas had to import foreign-made provisions from such backward entities as South Carolina," he cried. "Why is it that you are so poverty-stricken?" And time and again he warned his colleagues of the ultimate perils of segregation: "It may be some can chloroform their conscience. But if we fear long enough,, we hate, and if we hate long enough, we fight."

Around a desk stacked high with books and papers Gonzalez paced endlessly, munching raisins, sipping water, drawing heavily on his own experiences as a member of a minority group. He told of being barred from a cafe table because he was a Mexican. "The Irish have a saying, 'It's easy to sleep on another man's wounds.' Well, what's the difference,? Mexican, Negro, what have you? The assault on the inward dignity of man, which our society protects, has been made." And this, he said, is an assault on the very idea of America, which "began as a new land of hope . . . For whom does the bell toll? You, the white man, think it tolls for the Negro. I say, the bell tolls for you. It is ringing for us all."

Gonzalez and Kazen spoke for a record-breaking (for Texas) 36 hours and two minutes--and did not give up the fight until they won agreement from the segregationists to vote only on the first bill, leaving the rest for this week. Said Senator Gonzalez, after his colleagues passed the measure: "I intend to fight every one [of the other bills] to the last ditch."

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