While the Southerners kept the Senate stalled on civil rights, the Supreme Court last week pressed forward the cause of Negro voting rights in the South. Unanimously overturning the ruling of a U.S. district court in Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the key section of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which empowers the Justice Department to file civil suit on behalf of Negroes denied the right to vote by local officials.
The first use of the act—and its first legal test—came in southern Georgia's Terrell County, where in 1956 only 48 of 5,036 voting-age Negroes were...
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