Jackson Advocate

Civil Rights
(Continued from Page One)

the right to vote was held in Montgomery, Ala., and the Commission conducted a conference in Nashville, Tenn., attended by public school officials.

In its report to the President and Congress in September, the Commission said of the interrelationships between the three fields it is studying:

". . . If the right to vote is secured, but there is not equal opportunity in education and housing, the value of the right will be discounted by apathy and ignorance."

If compulsory discrimination is needed in public education but children continue to be brought up in slums and restricted areas of racial concentration, the conditions for good education and good citizenship will still not obtain.

In Atlanta, for instance, the Commission found that extension of the right to vote to Negroes has led to improve racial relations in other areas, including housing.

The Commission said it expected the California hearings would yield much information in areas in which it has not previously had the opportunity to examine closely. It pointed to the existence in California of the Mexican-American and Oriental minorities and the continued large migration of Negroes to the State.

Plans that were made last spring by the Commission to hold hearings on housing in Los Angeles were cancelled when the Commission decided to turn its attention instead to the larger number of voter registration complaints which it was receiving from Louisiana. A voting hearing in Louisiana was held up by a court order, and appeal from which is being taken by the Justice Department to the United States Supreme Court.

Unlike the voting hearing which was held in Alabama and the one planned in Louisiana, the general hearings in California will not include subpoenaed witnesses or testimony taken under oath. Witnesses will be invited to testify, as they were in the hearings held in New York, Chicago and Atlanta and the conference in Nashville.

The Commission plans that the hearings will be open to the public. Members of the Commission's California State Advisory Committee will be invited to attend as observers.