to state as a premise, Congressman, that where you have not discriminated, nonetheless, we are knocking them out. That is not true.

Mr. ASHMORE. Even if a State applies these rules or tests in a nondiscriminatory manner, that is not enough; the State must go further and show that 50 percent of the people voted. Aren't you saying that? Mr. KATZENBACH. No, Congressman; that is not correct. You don't have to show that. If 50 percent have not voted, then you have to show that there has been no discrimination.

Mr. ASHMORE. You said it the other way-in reverse. What is the difference?

Mr. KATZENBACH. Quite a big difference, Congressman. All we say is that if 50 percent of the people have not voted, all a State has to show is that it has not discriminated and it can go right on using the tests.

Mr. ASHMORE. All right. You have got South Carolina listed as one of the States that has discriminated or that has not voted 50 percent; in other words, listed as one to whom this law would apply. Mr. KATZENBACH. It is listed as a State which has to come in to court and prove it has not discriminated for the past 10 years.

Mr. ASHMORE. Yet, you don't have one single case on the record in recent years to show that they have discriminated against any man because of race or color. You don't know of any, do you, Mr. Attorney General?

Mr. KATZENBACH. It is correct that we have brought no cases in South Carolina. It would not be correct to say we have not discovered any evidence of discrimination.

Mr. ASHMORE. You have not found anybody guilty.

Mr. KATZENBACH. In enforcing the voting rights provision of the 1957 and 1960 acts, and the 1964 act more recently, we have adopted in the Department of Justice under my predecessor-and I would continue to do the same thing-a policy that, where we have found evi dence of discrimination, we have never brought a lawsuit if we have been able by process of negotiation and persuasion, and rather quietly to persuade people to cease and desist from what they have been doing and to register people.

It has been our experience in South Carolina that we have discovered instances of discrimination; we have talked to local officials and they have taken remedial steps, but it would not be correct to say that we have never had any evidence at all of discrimination.

Mr. ASHMORE. I would not say that about any State in the Union. Mr. KATZENBACH. It would be within the last 3 or 4 years, Congress

man.

Mr. ASHMORE. Let me read to you a few sentences from the civil rights hearings of 1963 when I was questioning Attorney General Kennedy. This is page 3734 of volume 4, at the bottom of the page. Attorney General Kennedy said: "Congressman, you are right about South Carolina. There are a couple of areas where there is a potential problem; it is not a problem in South Carolina."

So we had no problem in 1963. Now, do you have anything since 1963 to prove discrimination in South Carolina?

Mr. KATZENBACH. Yes; we do have two matters under active investigation at the moment.

Mr. ASHMORE. You have not found any of them to be cases of discrimination, though, have you?

Mr. KATZENBACH. We have not brought suit at this point.

Mr. ASHMORE. Now, with reference to South Carolina and your requirement that something else must be done, whatever you call it, and I think you would certainly admit this, you are adding something in this bill to the requirements that a State must comply with. In other words, there is nothing in the present law that says 50 percent of the qualified electors have to vote in order to not be discriminatory. Mr. KATZENBACH. No; no. There is not.

Mr. ASHMORE. Qualified to register? There is nothing in the 15th amendment that says that 50 percent of the qualified electors must be registered and must vote in an election, is there?

Mr. KATZENBACH. Not in those terms, but it says that Congress may enact such legislation as appropriate.

Mr. ASHMORE. All right. You also know that if you enact legislation it must apply equally to all people in all States or it would be unconstitutional, would it not?

Mr. KATZENBACH. Yes.

Mr. ASHMORE. All right. You have applied rules to these six States that do not apply to other States.

Mr. KATZENBACH. No.

Mr. ASHMORE. You are discriminating in the bill, itself; you are making it discriminatory.

Mr. KATZENBACH. That is not correct, Congressman.

Mr. ASHMORE. That is my opinion.

Mr. KATZENBACH. The rules that we laid down apply to every State and every county in the United States.

Mr. ASHMORE. But you say that these six States, because 50 percent of the qualified electors have not registered and voted, have discriminated.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Congressman, suppose you were just to lay down a simple proposition under the 15th amendment and simply say that you can't discriminate on grounds of race or color. You would agree with me that that would apply to all 50 States.

Then you find that people are discriminating in one State; I don't think that State can get up and say, "Look, because we are discriminating you are applying a different standard to us than to anybody else." Mr. ASHMORE. Your standard is not reasonable. It lets some States or counties discriminate and this bill would not touch them.

Mr. KATZENBACH. I think the standard is fair and reasonable. Mr. ASHMORE. To tell me that my State is going to be covered with this bill because 50 percent of the people don't vote when there is nothing in the law saying that 50 percent of them have to register or vote, when we are complying with the law regarding discrimination, is unfair and unjust. Certainly that is true when you say the purpose of your bill is, as you stated yesterday, to prevent massive resistance to Negro voting. That is what you said, isn't it?

Mr. KATZENBACH. Yes.

Mr. ASH MORE. That is the general statement which covers all of it. Mr. KATZENBACH. Yes.

Mr. ASHMORE You have to show me that there is evidence in South Carolina of massive resistance to Negroes voting before you can justify putting my State under the provisions of this law.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Well, there is a county, for example, in South Carolina which had 82 percent of the white population registered in 1962, 4 percent of the Negro.

Mr. ASHMORE. Any discrimination there that anybody has told you about?

Mr. KATZENBACH. It jumped up to 72 percent and then to 14 percent after we entered into some negotiations.

Mr. ASHMORE. All right. There is no discrimination, though.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Congressman, if there is no discrimination, you have not got a problem in the world under this bill; all you have to do is just come in and show it.

Mr. ASHMORE. All right. That is not what I am getting at. You are saying here we are violating the law.

Mr. KATZENBACH. No; I don't say that any State is violating the law. It is never said in the bill. It simply says that if you have these voting statistics, and if you have literacy tests, because of long past experience this tends to show a high probability that there has been some discrimination. You have to come in and show you have not been discriminating. Now, what is unreasonable about that?

Mr. ASHMORE. That is contrary to judicial procedure in this country with any man or State or anything else. You say in this bill we are presumed guilty and, thus, force us to go to court in Washington, D.C., and prove we are innocent. I say, if we are guilty, then its your duty to prove us guilty.

Mr. KATZENBACH. It is not a criminal charge.

Mr. ASHMORE. I don't care whether it is criminal or not but it is a charge of violating the law and not complying with the rules and regulations of the statute. The man that makes the charge has to prove it or he goes out of court on his neck in either a civil or criminal suit.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Time and time again, in court you have to come in and establish certain facts in order to be removed from certain restrictions.

Mr. ASHMORE. You should establish those facts; you are making the charge. But we will go on.

Mr. KATZENBACH. The only charge made is that 50 percent has not been registered and you have literacy tests.

Mr. ASHMORE. And, based on that, you claim we "may have discriminated some." Let's see why they have not been registered in South Carolina.

Mr. KATZENBACH. All right.

Mr. ASHMORE. The South Carolina Voter Education Project, a Negro group organized to get Negroes to register, told the Associated Press on March 16, 1965, in Columbus, S.C., that the problem is to get Negroes interested enough to register and vote. The spokesman said further:

The project is concentrating on a campaign to accomplish this, and qualified voters are being registered in all counties in the State as far as is known. There was not one charge of discrimination by the man in charge of the Negro voter registration machinery in South Carolina.

Now, here is another statement. In last night's Washington Star. Charles Bartlett's column, he talks about this same problem, about the low percentage of Negro people voting.

Incidentally, Mr. Attorney General, the fact that 50 percent of the people in my State or any other State does not vote does not necessarily mean, and it is not reasonable to infer from that fact alone, that there has been discrimination against one single person. Think for just a minute and you will recall that not until the last presidential election in 1964 did as many as 60 percent of the qualified electors and voters in the United States vote even for the Persident of the United States. Isn't that correct? It went a little over 60 percent last time.

Mr. KATZENBACH. I don't know what the figures are. It would be around 60, I would think, who voted in the last election.

Mr. ASHMORE. I think you ought to study well that fact before you want to come to the definite conclusion that because 50 percent of our people don't vote they are being discriminated against.

Furthermore, let me read what this man says, reading from Charles Bartlett's column, March 18. He is talking about this subject:

A $500,000 campaign produced 265,000 registrants, almost all of them in the cities. The inertia of fear and political disillusionment that pervades the rural Negro communities is extremely difficult to dent.

"You can send an army of Federal registrars down here," says Dr. Reginald Hawkins, who led the drive in North Carolina, “but rural Negroes won't register until they become convinced that their leaders are going to guide their voting power wisely."

Now, what are we going to do? Are you going to go out and herd them in and tell them they have to register? The voting organization in South Carolina says they have not registered and not because of any complaint or discrimination: they are spending money in North Carolina to have them register and the man in charge of it says they won't register.

Then, Mr. Attorney General, how can you say that we should be castigated, in so many words, and classified as a State that is discriminating when all you have is a mere assumption based on the fact that 50 percent of our Negroes did not register or vote? That is an unfair and unreasonable charge.

Mr. KATZENBACH. As I said, Congressman, I don't see the problem really, because if you have not been discriminating, it is very simple to come in and show that you have not and you are out from under the provisions of the bill.

Mr. ASH MORE. We have come in and shown we are not discriminating and we are not being even accused of it by the Negro people in the State who are in charge of the registration campaign. Now, then, is it fair, General, or constitutional, to pass a law that applies to only a few specified States but does not cover these 900 counties my colleague from Florida mentioned last night? In these various counties conditions were such that less than 50 percent of their people voted? Now, simply because they don't have an eligibility test, are you going to say that it is right for these 900 counties to get by with discrimination? Our literacy test is legal and constitutional, yet we are to be punished if we don't vote or register the proper ratio, whereas in 900 other areas where the vote ratio was the same there would be no penalty under this bill, solely because no literacy test is required. Mr. KATZENBACH. No one is being punished.

Mr. ASHMORE. I say you are punishing us when you put us in this situation. You are punishing us when you accuse us of discriminating because less than 50 percent of the people don't vote who are eligible to vote.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Of the seven States, the six in the South have large Negro populations. We have suits pending in some of them and we have judgments of discrimination. In all of these six States practices of segregation of Negroes, practices of segregated schooling, practices of social segregation, practices of economic segregation, have long existed.

I would think the very fact that this tool cut that precisely would be substantial reason to believe that they might be discriminating in other respects and they might be discriminating in voting. Now, if they are not, they have an opportunity to come in, but I would regard that as a reasonable inference from the statistical data.

Mr. ASHMORE. I think when you said "might," might have done this or might have done that, you are standing on very thin ice, Mr. Attorney General. The fact that a person or State "might be discriminating in voting" is an awfully weak premise to legislate on.

You mentioned integration. I have not mentioned that and I didn't intend to. South Carolina is not guilty of violating the statutes, either morally or legally on that score. The Governor of South Carolina called the president of the University of South Carolina when some Negro students wanted to enter and they entered without any untoward results at all.

At Clemson College, you will recall, 2 years ago a Negro man made application to enter there and when the day came, there were news reporters and photographers and police officers all over the campus and everybody thought there was going to be a lot of trouble. But the man walked in and there was not one word said because the president of the college and the Governor of the State said there would not be any. Our people complied with the law.

The people in South Carolina have acted in a proper and gentlemanly manner, and I don't think you should say we have been guilty of these things, discrimination, integration or otherwise.

Now I go to the next point and that is the fact that if a State has violated this law or been guilty of discrimination back over a period of 10 years, that then they would have to come in and show that they have stopped violating the law.

Now that 10 years, you think over it. You know that is an extremely long time.

This is something that has to be developed by evolution. Just like Billy Graham has said on more than one occasion, and no later than a couple of days ago.

You can pass all the laws you want to but it has to be done in the heart of man, through his relation and belief in God.

We and other States have gotten away from some of these things. We did it in years gone by, probably every State did it. But we are wiser and more tolerant now and it is not morally or legally right to punish us for sins committed years and years ago.

Frankly, it is unreasonable and unfair to say we have to go back 10 years and show that we didn't do something. I just don't think it is reasonable, and I don't believe that you will say so if you think about it. In any event, it would be an ex post facto law, and that is unconstitutional.

Mr. KATZENBACH. Congressman, South Carolina has made great progress in this field and it is greatly to its credit. It has complied