CIVIL RIGHTS: To the Roots

CIVIL RIGHTS To the RootsAttorney General William P. Rogers, heavily occupied with civil rights legalisms during his two-year tenure, last week angrily tongue-lashed the Mississippi grand jury that ignored evidence uncovered by the FBI after the lynching of Mack Charles Parker last April (TIME, Nov. 16). The grand-jury performance, said he, “was as flagrant and calculated a miscarriage of justice as I know of.” The grand jury’s failure to return indictments for the Negro’s murder showed the need for a new federal “criminal statute” to protect civil rights. “The nation will be shocked at the State of Mississippi’s refusal to act,” said he, when the U.S. presents its case before a federal grand jury in Biloxi next month.

Already pressing voter-registration suits against Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, the Justice Department last week set out for the first time to uphold the right of a Negro to vote in a local election. Moving under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the U.S. filed suit in Memphis federal court challenging a hoary custom of white Democrats in solidly Democratic Fayette County, Tenn.—the no-Negroes Democratic primary election conducted a year before each general election. Since in Fayette County the primary is the only real contest, the U.S. argued that Negroes are disfranchised by being barred.