Rights Paralysis

THROUGHOUT the summer, prospects have been bleak for civil rights supporters in Congress. Wary Congressmen, watching the swing to the right among the home voters, have lost much of their ardor for further federal civil rights legislation. Those guiding welfare bills through the House watched helplessly as the inevitable budget cuts took alarmingly large chunks out of their appropriations. Then, in June, the bomb fell. Guided by Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, the House came within inches of saddling an $18 billion HEW bill with a rider that threatened to return school desegregation efforts to the medieval 1950's.

Whitten's role as leader of the group came as no surprise. A conservative and long-time opponent of federal civil rights bills, Whitten had fought to trim every appropriation bill this year (except one providing for increasing Interstate Highway construction, much of it, coincidentally, in the South).

When the HEW bill came to the House, Whitten led more than his usual constituency of Southern Democrats. Pulling Northerners guarding against the Wallace threat into his alliance, Whitten rammed the rider through. None of the money voted in the bill, Whitten's amendment said, could be used or withheld to make local school districts integrate their schools.

The reaction was immediate. The rider, as HEW officials moaned at a news conference two days later, would "paralyze all school desegregation." While the laws and the court decisions requiring desegregation would stay on the books, the provision would strip the federal government of its most potent weapon: the use of federal funds as a lever to force integration.

The record of the past four years only tentatively suggests how important the fund-manipulation has been. Since the federal government gained the power to withhold the school grants in 1964, it has used it against only 115 school districts--most of them in Mississippi and Georgia.

Far more important, the HEW men said, was the deterrent effect. These 115 districts served as examples to their possibly-recalcitant neighbors. "For each one of the cut-offs we make," a Justice Department worker remarked, "we convince ten others to give in. They know they're going to lose if they hold out."

WITHOUT the fund power, the government knew its efforts would be confined to the Courts. Recent Supreme Court and Circuit Court decisions have explicitly ordered school districts to scrap any systems that aren't working. The problem, as both the school districts and HEW realized, is that the decisions don't mean anything until they are formally enforced by federal courts. Court efforts have complemented the fund cut-offs for the last four years, but at an agonizingly slow rate.

"I cannot foresee a substantial increase in rate," a federal judge in Alabama said last January, "and if the process is left to the courts, I think desegregation will take at least fifteen more years."

Jamie Whitten knew that too. He phrased the idea differently, but the thought seemed the same: "We think the little children should be able to stay at their schools," he said, "while all this is being fought in the courts."

Ironically, the fate of the desegregation efforts rested with Richard Nixon. House Republicans had cautiously straddled the issues during the Whitten debate, with Gerald Ford curiously silent about the GOP opposition philosophy. What Ford and his followers were waiting for was an official pronouncement from Nixon.

In early September, the pronouncement came, Nixon was with Whitten. The audience in South Carolina that heard Nixon reacted favorably, but liberals in the rest of the country immediately attacked Nixon's stand.

Nixon, after a frantic conference with his civilrights squad, seemed to realize his Agnew-like blunder. Two days later, the retraction came. Picking up the hint, Ford led the House Republicans in an effort to overturn the Whitten rider.

Last week, Whitten lost, 175 to 167. But the result was hardly an encouraging victory for Congressional civil rights forces. No ground was lost. But those who hoped for more federal sanctions were beaten soundly.

As Democrat Jeffrey Cohelan of California said, "Right now, we're holding on. It will be several years before we're able to start moving again."