“During
1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy appeared before the Senate
Judiciary Committee to present drastic civil rights proposals of the
Kennedy Administration. As an opponent of these proposals, he and I
staged for days what the news media called the “Sam and Bobby Show.” At
the outset, I stated that I could understand why his brother, the
President, wished to abolish literacy tests. His signature revealed, I
asserted, that he could not write.
The
Attorney General had a penchant for invoking statistics to sustain his
opinions. I undertook to refute the inferences he drew from them by this
anecdote.
An
old South Mountaineer in Burke County had been buying his groceries on
credit from the neighborhood grocer. Believing it time to make payment
for them, the old Mountaineer asked the grocer for the amount of his
bill, and complained with vigor that it was exorbitant when the grocer
told him what it was. The grocer thereupon opened his account books,
laid them on the counter, and told the Mountaineer, “here are the
figures; you know figures don’t lie.” The old Mountaineer responded,
“figures may not lie but liars sure do figure.”
Since
I desired my humor to illuminate but not wound, I hastened to add, “And
honest men also figure, and in so doing, often reach incorrect
conclusions.
Like
many Northerners who advocated civil rights proposals, Attorney General
Kennedy had a simple explanation for illiteracy among blacks in the
South. Its sole cause, in his view, was State discrimination against
blacks in education. This explanation was too simplistic. The South
suffered in times past from much illiteracy among both whites and
blacks. Southern States were too poor in the aftermath of the Civil War
to maintain adequate schools. The poverty of their parents oftentimes
necessitated keeping children out of the inadequate schools that did
exist because their labor was essential to the family support. Besides,
illiteracy sometimes resulted from laziness, or a contempt for
education.
Inasmuch
as I was the only opponent of his civil rights proposals who habitually
appeared at meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Attorney
General obviously tried to embarrass me by discrediting my home State,
North Carolina. He announced that the census of 1960 revealed that
North Carolina was the habitat of about 30,000 illiterate blacks, and
asserted that such revelation showed that North Carolina discriminated
against blacks in education.
I
asked him what census disclosed with respect to the ages of blacks
illiterate in North Carolina. He disclaimed any knowledge of that fact,
and said that North Carolina had compulsory school attendance laws for
many years and that I would surmise that most of the illiterate blacks
residing in it were adults when he was born.
After
the Senate Judiciary Committee recessed I studied the census of 1960
for myself. I discovered that my surmise in respect to the ages of
illiterates in North Carolina was correct. I also discovered to my
surprise, and to Attorney General Kennedy’s consternation, that the
census of 1960 disclosed his home State, Massachusetts, numbered among
it inhabitants about 60,000 illiterate whites.
When
I made this disclosure to the Committee, I assured the Attorney General
that I did not maintain it proved that Massachusetts discriminated
against whites in education.”
(Preserving
the Constitution; The Autobiography of Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., 1984,
The Michie Company, Charlottesville, Virginia, pp. 160-161)
No comments:
Post a Comment