Predictable Welcome

Established last year under the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the six-member U.S. Civil Rights Commission spent nearly a year getting itself organized, set this week for its first formal hearings. Predictably, it ran right off the bat into something less than Southern hospitality.

The commission's first investigation took it to Montgomery, Ala., to look into charges that Negro voting rights had been violated. But the commissioners found themselves unable to stay together at a Montgomery hotel because one of them, former Assistant Labor Secretary J. Ernest Wilkins, is a Negro. Having found quarters at Maxwell Air Force Base, the group promptly encountered another welcome-mat-turned-stumbling-block. When they tried to subpoena county voting records, they discovered that Circuit Judge George Wallace (who was soundly whipped for Governor this year by equally segregationist-minded Attorney General John Patterson) had impounded the records, was threatening to jail any commission investigator who came nosing around.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.