100 Years Later

It was just a century ago, in the midst of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In a special report to the President last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (one Negro and five whites), looked back over the successes and failures of the Negro's struggle since then. The commission's judgment: "More forces are working for the realization of civil rights for all Americans than ever before in history."

The real spurt in civil rights progress, says the report, dates from the Supreme Court school segregation decision of 1954: "From this decision has flowed a series of court decisions making it clear that segregation is a dead letter in every area of public activity."

In the past decade, the Negro has made more gains than in all previous U.S. history: the armed forces have been desegregated; the nation's capital has banned segregation; virtually all airports, bus and railway stations through the South have been desegregated; and a long-awaited executive order prohibiting discrimination in federally aided housing has been signed. Today the statutes of 21 states include enforceable fair employment practice laws, and more Negroes hold elective offices in the U.S. than at any time since the Reconstruction days of 1877.

But in the administration of U.S. justice, the commission reports, the Negro is still often denied a citizen's rights. Between 1958 and 1960, Negroes were the victims in 35% of the incidents of alleged police brutality, though they make up only 10% of the population. In many Southern counties, Negroes are still denied the vote by one devious means or another, have never served on a grand jury, and are seldom selected for trial juries.

Even when resistance to the established law of the land and to social change is overcome in the South, the Negro faces a trying struggle in the very area from which he has historically drawn civil rights support: the North. "It is here that the last battle for equal rights may be fought in America," says the report. "The 'gentlemen's agreement' that bars the minority citizen from housing outside the ghetto; the employment practices that often hold him in a menial status, regardless of his capabilities; and the overburdened neighborhood schools, which deprive him of an adequate education despite his ambitions --these are the subtler forms of denial and the more difficult to eliminate.''

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.