i 94c £fid4igan &atly J e ei ght yr C(Is of e(ditoril freedomn Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan walter shapiro On the art of self-delusion I in washiiigtoiu -.1 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: '764-0552 1 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. [THURSDAY, fU LY 31, 1959 NIGHT EDITOR: NADINE COHODAS ! 1 ,.r R ecorder s Court: Iiother assa It on justice YET ANOTHER glorious act of justice came out of Detroit's Recorders Court yesterday as Rafael Viera was ordered to stand trial on second' degree murder charges for the slaying of Patrolman Michael Czapski in the March New Bethel Church shootout during a meeting of the black separatist Republic of New Africa. Recorders Court is the/place where just last week archcriminal John Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison for offer- ing pot to undercover police. Not only did Sinclair 'receive that incredible sentence, but he was also subjected to the senile preachments of the judge, ,who warned him sternly that his day had come and justice would always conquer over "John Sinclair and his ilk." The couirt's notoriety goes back to the 1967 Detroit riots, when all the judges ex- cept George Crockett, who is black, were sharply criticized for what were said to be wholesale violations of the rights of defendants-black defendants? including de facto suspension of habeas corpus, set- ting of unusual and possibly unconstitu- tionally high bonds, and extremely irreg- ular judicial procedures such as deciding cross-examination by the de'fense was not necessary. The Rafael Viera case is an extremely questionable one for two reasons. First, the prosecution's star witness, David Brown, is himself under arrest for assault with intent to commit murder. He was apprehended during the exchange of fire which police said took place in the church when they shot their way in searching for the assailant of Czapski's partner, Rich- ard Worobec. Worobec had been wounded, earlier. BUT SINCE it was determined that Brown also witnessed the shooting S1itu ['1er S/aff MARCIA ABR AMSON............ .... . Co-Editor CHRIS STEELE.....-........ . . ...Co-Editor MARTIN HIRSCHMAN .. Summer Suppleinent Editor JIM FORRESTER. .......,..... Summer'Sports Editor LEE KIRK ...........ssociate Summer Sports Editor ERIC PERGEAUX ... . .......-...... . Photo Editor NIGHT EDITORS: Nadine Cohodas, Martin Hirsch- man, Judy Sarasohn, Daniel Zwerdling. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS: Laurie Harris, Judy Kahn, Scott Mixer, Bard Montgomery. Business Staff GEORGE BRISTOL, Business Manager STEVE ELMAN .. Administrative Advertising Manager SUE LERNER.................Senior Sales Manager LUCY PAPP. ,.... .... Senior Sales Manager NANCY ASIN.... , ..........Senior Circulation Manager BRUCEHAYDON.................inance Manager DARIA KROGULSKI....,.Associate Finance Manager BARBARA SCHULZ,... ..........Personnel Manager outside the church, he is being treated as a juvenile. Since he is 19 years old, police have that option open-although they originally charged him as an adult. Even more crucial is the testimony of Czapski's partner, Worobec, who admit- ted that he could not identify Viera as the man who killed Czapski. If Worobec cannot verify the killer's identity, how can a judge reasonably expect a jury to find Viera guilty? Attorney Milton Henry, who is also president of the separatist Republic of New Africa, was stunned by the deciison to bind Viera over for trial. He was-and rightfully so - expecting a dismissal. Henry himself also took the stand be- cause, he said, he had been with Viera inside the church when Czapski was killed. Henry and Viera's other attorney, Shel- don Halpern, have both said that they are' certain Brown is lying. But Judge Robert Evans said he was satisfied with Brown's testimony as evidence that a trial was warranted. He did not mention Worobec's testimony. Henry also testified that Brown had earlier told him of a beating he had received in jail before becoming star witness. Viera was arrested during the hysteria which followed the shootout, chiefly be- cause of false reports that Crockett had set up court after police arrested all the 140 people in the church at the time and released them all overthe objections of the police. IN REALITY, Crockett had released only 10 of those arrested without police con- sent, because they were not informed of their right to counsel during nitrate tests, which Crockett considered a key part of the police investigation. All the others, were released with police consent. But the Detroit news 'media-notably the De- troit News - continued to repqrt that Crockett released all those arrested, who included women, children and the church janitor'. Crockett's action has been vindicated by almost every legal and judicial au- thority and association in the city and the country, despite the' outcry raised by the Detroit Police Officers Association. PERHAPS VIERA has replaced him as the most convenient scapegoat in a city which is rapidly becoming divided into two armed camps. It is too bad for Viera, whose fate may now depend on the color lines of his jury. --MARCIA ABRAMSON Co-Editor AT FIRST GLANCE the results of the 1965 Voting Rights Act seem impres- sive. Before the Act, black registration in six Deep South states - Alabama., Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia - was estimated to be 877,000. Between 1965 and the summer of 1968, black registration rose by more than 800,- 000 in these six states and the 39 counties of North Carolina covered by the Act. Black registration in these six states now ranges from a low of 50.8 per cent in South Carolina to a high of 59.4 per cent in Mis- sissippi. The 1965 Act, perhaps the most radical of the decade's retrospectively pallid at- tempts to legislate equality, was seen at the time of its passage as providing the black man with the political leverage w h i c h would eventually ensure his social and ee- onomic equality. The Act empowered the Attorney Gen- eral to oversee almost all election and reg- istration procedures in t h e most retro- grade Southern states. But despite the al- most touching faith of its adherents in the power of the ballot, the actual political effects of this landmark legislation have been surprisingly small. NO BLACK MAN holds statewide office in the South. And outside of Georgia, there is no more than one black member in any state legislature covered by the Act. The only places where blacks have achiev- ed any political power are small towns like Fayette, Miss., which are largely under the sway of the white-controlled county and state governments. Registration drives and similar projects have been successful in temporarily politi- cizing large numbers of Southern blacks. But a continued lack of substantive change, will return many of them to the relative political apathy of the dispossessed. And in view of the continuing homogeneity of Southern white politics, the prognosis for the future is less than encouraging. Traditionally, minorities have -been in- fluential when they had some social and economic, as w e11 as electoral, leverage. But the black,.man in the South merely has only the less than adequate power of his numbers. And experience seems to in- dicate that in modern America, economic and social position lead to political ad- vancement, rather than the reverse. NUMBERS LIKE registration figures have a persuasive value far beyond their statistical importance. And the Nixon Ad- ministration is composed of men who are easily persuaded on the subject of voting rights. They saw these registration figures as evidence that the strong provisions of the 1965 Act were no longer needed. On June 26, rather than supporting a five year ex- tension of the 1965 Act - scheduled to ex- pire in August of 1970 - the Nixon Ad- ministration presented a series of amend- ments which would'substantially alter the Act. The Nixon bill provoked harsh attacks from Democrats and a surprisingly large number of Republicans. The bolder among them contended that the Administration bill was merely a campaign debt owed Sen. Strom Thurmond. - The Administration proposals, so the ar- gument went, were not to be taken ser- iously themselves, but were designed to de- lay and hopefully divert passage of a sim- ple five year extension of the Act. Such cynicism is much too charitable. The Nixon proposals were designed by well-intentioned men who expected to be taken seriously. The resulting piece of leg- islation provides an excellent example of the intellectual and technical slovenliness. of the new Administration. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit, the de facto leader of the House's nine Negroes, said in a recent interview, "I'm amazed that they were so unsubtle. If they wanted to be racist, they could have supported simple extension and just not enforced it." THE DISCRETIONARY POWERS grant- ed the Justice Department under the 1965 Act are broad. In the states covered by the Act, the Attorney General'c a n appoint Federal registrars and observers with au- thority over state officials. Even more potent is Section 5, which requires that the Attorney General approve all changes in election and voting laws in areas covered by the Act. No one would have bothered to examine According to the ever-shifting figures provided by Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, the Justice Department has in the past four years voided only 10 of 345 election laws submitted under Section 5. - DESPITE THIS relatively mild enforce- ment, anyone but the most doctrinaire lib- eral will admit that the 1965 Act is a con- trived and messy piece of legislation. The elaborate triggering mechanism was de- signed to apply only to the Deep South - and some say that Lyndon Johnson rigged the formula to exempt Texas from cover- age by the Act. The Attorney General, under questioning from Sen. Edward Kennedy during Senate hearings on July 11, admitted he would not have favored the Act in 1965. To many of the intellectually prosaic a piece of con- trived legislation seems a greater injustice than the abuse it is attempting to remedy. Some provisions of the Nixon proposals seem sincerely designed to improve the coverage of the 1965 Act. Under the Ad- ministration bill, literacy tests would be banned nationally (but only until 1974), the Attorney General empowered to send voting 'examiners anywhere-even Cook County-and a uniform national residency requirement created for voting in Presi- dential elections. , However, the triggering mechanism is re- moved from the Act, eliminating the spe- cial Federal scrutiny of the seven Southern states. Under the Nixon bill aggrieved par- ties must file suit in local Federal court rather than in the highly sympathetic Dis- trict of Columbia court system. And most important of all, Section 5 is scrapped. The deficiencies of the Nixon bill should not imply that the 1965 Act is beyond repair. Rather they tend to suggest that it is the Nixon Administration which is un- salvageable. The haste with which the Justice Depart- ment appears to have prepared their ar- guments adds credence to the claims of a leading civil rights lobbyist that until re- cently Nixon was totally unaware of the whole issue-even though the bill to ec- tend the 1965 Act was introduced in Con- gress is early January. DURING HIS Senate testimony on July 11, the Attorney General seemed awed by his vast power under Section 5. Mitchell complained that the Section "results in arbitrary decisions based on insufficient in- formation" by the Justice Department. Mitchell inadvertently hit upon one of the key weaknesses of broadening the cov- erage of the 1965 Act when he argued, "With the entire nation covered, it would be impossible . . . to screen every voting change in the nation." Birch Bayh, who along with Kennedy is the only liberal in the nine-member sub- committee, circuitously attempted to force Mitchell to admit that if the Justice De- partment cannot properly evaluate legis- lation under Section 5, it could not be able to intelligently file suit under the Nixon proposals. Finally the Attorney General responded lamely, "There is no problem finding dis- criminatory laws; they become public is- sues." When Attorney General Mitchell later tried to buttress his arguments by bemoan- ing the Justice Department's small in- vestigatory staff, Kennedy asked in mock innocence, "Didn't you just ask for more FBI agents?" There was something vaguely amusing about Mitchell's inability to cite any causal evidence linking Northern -literacy tests. with low voter turnouts in ghetto areas, Without citing any factual basis other than wishful thinking, the Attorney General continually referred to the "psychological effects" of literacy tests. MEN LIKE MITCHELL seem to take comfort in believing that black electoral apathy is a legal problem subject to a simple legislative remedy, rather than an indictment of our entire system of un- representative politics. Statistically a ban on literacy tests would seem to have little impact. New York, with the most rigid literacy test in the nation, administered its written exam- ination to 15,089 prospective voters in 1968 and 96.2 per cent passed. The Census Bureau estimates that in- cluding the institutionalized; there are only 750,000 illiterates of voting age in the 10 Northern states with operative literacy tests. The carelessness of the Nixon Adminis- tration became almost embarrassing when one examines the proposal for a uniform residency requirement for Preidential elec- tions. Twenty-nine states have special resi- dency provisions for voting in Presidential elections which are more lenient than those proposed by the Attorney General. And even the effects of these special residency; provisions are minimal. Of 7.3 million people who voted in California' in 1968, only about 20,000 took advantage'of the-special residency requirement for voting for President. The rest, presumably' spent election day unpacking the dishes. . To buttress his argument Mitchell re- peatedly cited a Census Bureau estimate that 5.5 million people of voting age were unable to vote in the 1968 election because they could not meet local residency require- ments. While a report issued by the Census Bureau last October does cite this figure, an apparently overlooked footnote explains that "no allowance was made for those eligible to vote for President, under special residence provisions." In the 21' states and the District of Columbia where the Nixon residency pro- posals would mean a liberalization, less than 1.5 million voters failed to meet residency requirements last year. CURRENTLY both the Nixon proposals and simple five-year extension of the Act are bottled up in Sen. Sam Ervin's Judi- ciary subcommittee. The subcommittee, proceeding with all deliberate speed, has held several hearings primarily highlighted by displays of Ervin's encyclopediac knowl- edge of North Carolina political trivia and his repertoire of rustic humor. Five-year extension has been favorably -reported out by the House Judiciary -Com- mittee and the Nixon proposals may be re- submitted to that Committee as, a supple- mentary bill. While simple extension faces relatively smooth sailing in the House, the tedious and rather anachronistic charade of the Senate considering civil rights legis- lation may produce sporadic headlines well into November. Extension of the 1965 Act will protect and probably promote black registration in the South. But there is little that can be done legislatively which will make these voting rights politically meaningful for Southern blacks. The voting rights bill can be seen as a test of what Congress has learned from this cataclysmic decade. Not a test of their at- titude toward civil rights, rather it is a 'test of their capacity for self-delusion about the efficacy of the power of the ballot. 4- be $4 Aty. Gen. Mitchell the Nixon record of enforcing the 1965 Act, if the President had done the:expect- ed and. supported a simple five year ex- tension. Few noticed that Attorney Generals Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark were not totally distinguished in adminis- tering the Act. The Civil Rights Commission has con- stantly complained of the shortage and timidity of Federal examiners dispatched under the Act. According to the Commis- sion, voting examiners have been sent to only 2 of the 43 Southern counties where ,black registration is less than 35 per cent. Clarence Mitchell, chief lobbyist for the NAACP, acknowledged and exonerated the weakness of the Act's enforcement when he said in an interview, "The 1965 Act has not been utilized to its maximum capabil- ity. But the primary failure to make use of its provisions, is due to the taking of every opportunity to allow the states to take action without Federal intervention." A stronger view was expressed by David Hunter, staff attorney for the Civil Rights Commission, who said, "There hasn't been the progress one might have expected in four years. Examiners have not been sent in sufficient numbers. And Section 5 was . . . 'not applied to Mississippi until this year." ,$ Blac buesmen: They're bringing it home to Ann Irbor By HOWARD A. HUSOCK Daily Guest Writer Within the past year, America has suddenly found time to experience something called the "rebirth of the blues." On magazine covers, in un- derground journals, in popular mus- ic - the blues. Blues has surfaced into the popular culture. It has sur- faced not from the so-called under- ground or "hip" subculture but from an underground far deeper - t h e black culture. For blues, the on I y purely native American music, iron- ically was spawned and nurtured by a man often considered as less than an American, the black man. Blues was born of people poor and hungry but now, in the midst of the revival, answers needs for those who are rich but still hungry, hungry in spirit. And those who are hungry in that way, who view the blues revival as more than a passing commercial fad, feel an obligation to look into those black roots and listen to what the surviving black musicians a r e playing. A group of such blues enthusiasts has formed in Ann Arbor, and with the help of a grant from the Univer- sity has planned a three-day excur- sion into the b 1a c k origins of the blues, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, to be held this weekend. The lineup Mama" Mae will be at Ann Arbor to sing her "Ball and Chain," which be- came Janis' encore number. The re- cent publicity splash on Johnny Win- ter has not produced a similar splash for Muddy Waters, to whom Winter owes an incalculable debt. But not everyone is ignoring Muddy's Chica- go version of amplified blues. He will be at Ann Arbor along with his con- temporaries such as James Cotton, Howlin' W o If, Junior Wells, J. B. Hutto, and Otis Rush. Although there are m a n y white musicians who h a v e gained great popularity with their version of the. blues, Ann Arbor is designed primar- ily as a tribute to the black blues- men, the originators of the blues., But any act, musical or otherwise, can be meaningless unless it can be understood in its context. For t h e blues, the context has always been the black American sub-culture, but that sub-culture has not been a con- stant thing and neither has the style of the blues. The earliest spawning ground for blues lies far south of Ann Arbor in the humid delta countryside of Mis- sissippi. There, throughout the black man's itinerant wanderings from slavery to sharecropping, the old Af- rican chants took on new rhythms. ton, Son House, and Robert Johnson. Of this triumvirate only House re- mains alive and will make one of his rare appearances at Ann Arbor. Charley Patton, in forming what was at times a prototype blues and sometimes a refined music, applied his knowledge of popular songs and spirituals to lay the bedrock of re- corded twelve-bar blues. His music was very much tied to the land and his community, but it is mainly the legacy of his vocal style and guitar playing t h a t he passed on to Son House that has immortalized h i m. Son moved more closely to a set pat- tern of blues but still left a lot of lee- way for himself for spontaneous emotion, and certainly that leeway never has really left the blues. He became and remains a virtuoso of "bottleneck" guitar, a blues style in which the guitar is tuned open to a chord and the fretting is done with a glass neck of a whiskey bottle or with a metal pipe. The story of Son's relation to the young Robert Johnson is perhaps the most important in blues history. Johnson, an eighteen year old genius fresh from a plantation, listened ex- tensively to other bluesmen, espec- ially to Son House. He took Son's music and tightened it and refined thins, but it still can be at times thq most powerful blues of all: a solitary man and his guitar. I once heard a man say of Son House's Perform- ance: "It's like he dies onstage." But from Robert Johnson through Elmore James, B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, James Cotton, and especially Muddy Waters, the blues took on its amplified "Chicago" sound. Muddy Waters first recorded as a Mississip- pi bottleneck guitarist, but by 1949 still does. But its influence has ex- tended beyond Chicago, beyond the black community. The rock 'n roll sound of the fif- ties and sixties was just an up-tempo of the Chicago blues sound. But de- spite its contribution to the rock cul- ture, the Chicago style has itself re- mained intact. The new blues audience, and the new white musicians have found out that all those words like alienation m A;: :/