Chomping on a long black cigar in an amber holder, stubby, silver-haired Leander Perez, segregationist boss of Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, gave the Senate Judiciary Committee the lowdown on what Negroes are really like. "They are of immoral character," drawled the Democratic politician. Their only interest is "to get welfare checks," he said. "They are a low type of citizenship."
Give them the vote? Poppycock, puffed Perez. Why, in a neighboring parish there were 800 registered Negroes, "and every damn election they've got to bribe them." What is more, he added, they had to be bribed according to class. "There are $2 voters, $5 voters and $10 voters," he declared. "And they know each other too. The $10 voters would not ride to the polls with a $2 voter—it's beneath their dignity."
For hours the Senators permitted Perez to prattle on. Finally their patience wore thin. When Perez declared that "there is a Communist plan" behind the bill, Illinois Republican Everett M. Dirksen, one of its chief architects, made him eat his words. "That," snapped Senator Dirksen, "is about as stupid a statement as has ever been uttered in this committee room." Cowed, Perez asked that his comment be stricken from the record.
The confrontation between segregationist and Senate minority leader was only one of a cavalcade of scenes in the continuing drama of the civil rights movement last week. Elsewhere:
> In the House Un-American Activities Committee, five Southerners joined the other four members in unanimously approving a full-scale investigation of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Chairman Edwin E. Willis, a Louisiana Democrat, a preliminary study showed that "shocking crimes are carried out by highly secret action groups within the Klans." And despite the committee's disrepute in some quarters for its blunt and into-every-corner antiCommunism, there were signs that it might prove the sharpest ax on Capitol Hill for cutting the Klan down to size. "Klanism is incompatible with Americanism," said Chairman Willis. "The South and the entire nation will be much better off if all Klan influence is ended, once and for all."
>In Alabama's Capitol atop Goat Hill in Montgomery, Governor George C. Wallace spent 80 minutes talking cordially with 16 civil rights leaders who had vainly attempted to see him after the march from Selma to Montgomery two weeks ago. "If he had laid it on just a little bit thicker," said one of the delegates, "he would have had everyone in that room run out and vote for him." He did slip once, though, when he told his visitors, all but one of them Negroes, how upset he had been at reports that his highway patrol had recently mistreated a couple of "niggers." Otherwise Wallace was as smooth and strong as bonded bourbon. He even gave the delegates autographed portraits of himself.