The Public Is Everyone

Down in the fine print of almost all appropriation bills Congress customarily stipulates that anything built with public funds shall be "for public use." In 1951 Mississippi unquestioningly accepted that familiar provision along with $1,133,000 in federal funds to repair the hurricane-torn sea wall along the Gulf Coast beach stretching some 24 miles westward from Biloxi. So far as segregationist Mississippi was concerned, the "public" that could use the beach was white only.

That long-standing Deep South definition was challenged last week by the Justice Department in a suit filed against the city of Biloxi. In a brand-new kind of assault on segregation in the South's "public" parks and beaches, the U.S. argued that Negroes, too, are members of the public, entitled to equal use of the public beach. The suit was a quick legal response to a protest staged by Negroes on Biloxi's beach in April. Club-wielding whites mauled the Negro bathers; in a nightmare of ambush and reprisal, eight Negroes and two whites were wounded by gunfire.

The Government suit, cried Mississippi's Senators Eastland and Stennis in a joint statement, is "a raw, rank and political gesture." Mississippi's legal defense, such as it is, is likely to be based on the contention that Negroes on the beach would jeopardize public safety, thereby thwarting "public use."

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