Box 17, Folder 14, Document 40

Box 17, Folder 14, Document 40

Mary MeGrory
Sen. Hart Shifts the Ground,

Puts Life Into Rights Hearing

; WASHINGTON—The Negro spiritual goes: “Everybody talkin’ "bout Heaven,
Ain’t going there—Heaven.”” Well, they were talking about Heaven at, of all
places, the civil rights hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. And be-

cause one was a liberal Demorcratie senator from Michigan and the other was the segregationist
governor of Alabama they couldn't agree on whether in paradise there would be separate but equal

facilities for the races.

Gov. Wallace struck the ce-
lestial chord first and later ob-
viously wished he hadn’t,

The pugnacious, pug-nosed
governor had had a happy
morning twanging out easy an-
swers to easy questions played
to him by like-minded Sen.
Thurmond, Democrat of South
Carolina.

“Governor,”’ asked the sena-
tor, “Do you believe in equal
opportunity for all men, be they
white, black or tan?”

“Of course I do,’ the gov-
ernor came in. And then his
thoughts, you might say, soared.

“IT am not one of these in-
tellectuals who thinks there is
no God,” he said with pride.

“I think there is one and in
fact I know there is one. I be-
lieve he made the whole human
family and he loves all man-
kind, and any man who would
mistreat anyone on account of
his color, I feel sorry for
them.”

Any other man would have
said “amen” to that, but Sen.
Hart is highly unconventional
and he promptly put to Wallace
the most arresting question yet
heard in the repetitious hear-

ings.
“What will Heaven be like?
Will it be segregated?”
Wallace was plainly shocked.
“T don’t think that you or I,
either one, knows exactly what



Heaven will be like,” he said
reprovingly.

The governor had for two days
been freely predicting what would
happen here if the Senate
passed the civil rights bill. He
had admonished the Defense
department to look away from
Dixie. He had prophesied a
white uprising and the end of
the free enterprise system.

But Hart’s shifting of the
ground to the hereafter put him
off. His code does not permit
him to speculate, as Hart in-
vited him to do, about the eat-
ing facilities in Heaven, pro-
vided the human family does
eat in eternity.

He said stiffly he thought that
segregation on earth was in
the best interests of both races.

If Hart nettled the governor
with his theology, he confused
him with his open-mindedness.

He admitted he didn’t know
something, which Wallace would
never do. He said he didn’t
know what a Negro parent
would do if he were a mem-
ber of the Armed Forces who
had grown up in the North and
were assigned to the South and
had to explain local conditions
to his. children.

Hart asked to be excused for
further civil rights duty down-
stairs in the auditorium where
a large crowd and the Senate
Judiciary Committee, of which
he is also a member, had gath-
ered to hear the attorney gen-
eral, After some inaudible ex-
changes about whether the
Southern senators should be
heard first, it was decided that
Mr. Kennedy should go back
to the Justice department while
the committee heard the views
of Sen. Ervin, Democrat of
North Carolina.

Hart came through loud and
clear on the auditorium’s
chancy amplifying system. He
said: “We came closer to dis-
aster in Birmingham than in
Cuba.”

if he keeps up the perform-
ance of the past week, Hart
may prove that a man need-be
neither a windbag nor _a'dema-
gogue to make a namie for him-
self in the trotbled field of
civil vights: