The Law & De Lawd

In the three months since the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act went into effect, only 177,443 of the South's 3,000,000 disfranchised Negroes have qualified to vote in the states automatically covered by the new law. On this showing, enrollments will plainly fall short of Martin Luther King's trumpeted target of 900,000 to 1,000,000 new Negro voters in the law's first year.

Last week, amid criticism by civil rights leaders that the Justice Department has not sent enough federal registrars into the Deep South, U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach ordered examiners into twelve more Southern counties, making a total of 32 where they will be posted. Six of the new counties are in Mississippi: one encompasses the capital at Jackson; three are in Alabama; two are in South Carolina, which heretofore has escaped federal intervention; and one is in Louisiana. Katzenbach stoutly denied that he acted to placate Negro critics, announced that the counties involved either refused to enroll illiterates or else were delaying unreasonably in processing Negro applicants.

No Novelty. In fact, the Justice Department has scrupulously heeded the intent of the law, which aims primarily to encourage local compliance. Katzenbach has done his utmost to persuade county officials to obey the law rather than have federal registrars sent in. As a result of such pressure--and patience --two-thirds of all new Negro voters have been voluntarily registered by local officials.

The problem is that in many areas eligible Negroes are simply not applying to register. "The novelty has worn off," confesses one civil rights worker. Federal examiners in several counties have cut down their office hours for want of applicants. In Jones County, Miss., recently, a federal registrar waited all one Saturday to sign up Negro voters; not one showed up.

New Crusade. One reason for the slowdown, of course, is that late fall is the peak of the cotton-picking season, and many Negroes are too busy toting to worry about voting. Also, without doubt, many fear white retaliation if they register. Nonetheless, admits Clarence Mitchell, N.A.A.C.P.'s chief Washington lobbyist, "we need to put in more effort." The most conspicuous absentee from the registration campaign has been Martin Luther King, who for years raised Negro suffrage as his battle cry. Since winning the Nobel Prize, "De Lawd," as his followers call King, has been so preoccupied with global affairs, such as the war in Viet Nam, that he has had little time for the cotton-picker vote.

Off on yet another trip last week--he was lecturing in Europe--King suddenly hurried home to concentrate oh an urgent new problem. However, his latest campaign is not to spur the Negro registration drive but to crusade for a law to make racial violence a federal crime. As it happened, the Justice Department was already moving on the problem in its own way. Acting for the first time under a section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the department intervened in a suit in an Alabama federal court alleging systematic exclusion of Negroes from juries in "Bloody Lowndes" County, where twice in the past month all-white juries have exonerated whites in the slaying of civil rights workers.

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