Atlanta Daily World

RIGHTS BILL BACKERS CLAIM "VICTORY" VOTES

Powell Terms Jury Trial Amendment Bar To Race Votes

WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives Monday will return to debate on civil rights legislation, which proponents claim will pass despite desperate Southern efforts.

Rep. Bolling, Democrat of Missouri, said Saturday that "as of now we have the votes" to defeat the Southern-backed jury trial amendment.

Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat of New York, had termed the so-called jury trial amendment to civil rights legislation pending in Congress as "a loaded gun aimed at the voting rights of colored people in the United States."

The New York solon released this declaration in a letter issued from Bethesda Naval Hospital where he is recovering from a heart attack suffered in his pulpit at Abyssinia Baptist Church June 2.

Powell's letter quoted Attorney General Herbert Brownell who recently testified "Enactment of legislation providing for jury trial in contempt cases arising out of governmental litigation would undermine the authority of the federal courts by seriously weakening their power to enforce lawful orders."

Powell said, "This is exactly what those who want to keep the colored man in a sub-citizen status want. They have already made a mockery in the state courts by letting those who dynamite homes and churches go free. They have perfected a system under which admitted murders have no fear of punishment under existing courts. No matter how cleverly the proponents of the amendment may

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seek to clothe it with legalisms the colored people of the nation will know that those who vote for the amendment are hiding behind old quackery that gave birth to the "separate but equal' doctrine. the grandfather clause and the Ku Klux Klan.

"Republicans and northern Democrats who pretend that they did not read the bill in committee or now profess to see great danger to the jury system are admitting that they are guilty of a vice that many thinking colored people have suspected for some time. They are willing to let a thousand Negroes be deprived of their rights, to be forced from their homes and business by economic pressure and shot or intimidated at the polling places

On the other hand, when these so-called supporters of the jury trial amendment see the rotten structure of segregation and discrimination threatened by the cleansing power of Federal authority they rally to any banner that is raised by those who now hold political power in the Deep South.

"When the anti-lynching bill was before Congress they set out to prove that it was unconstitutional. When the FEPC bill was under consideration they falsely insisted that it would force employers to hire colored people who were not qualified workers. At the political conventions in 1956 they were not satisfied until they had sacrificed the United States Supreme Court itself on the altar of party harmony and expediency."

"The vote on H. R. 6127 is an opportunity for the men and women in public office to stand firm for the right to vote. No matter who gets elected in Brooklyn and San Francisco, our country will not have representative government until our citizens everywhere in the land are free to cast their ballots without fear and intimidation based on race."

"As a final word to Democrats let me say that the colored voters of the North are fed up with weak platforms and watered down legislation. They are increasingly asking the question, why send Pennsylvania and Ohio Democrats to Congress if they must take their orders from middle men who serve the White Citizens Councils in Mississippi and Alabama?'