Since President Truman appointed Tom Clark and Sherman Minton to the Supreme Court a year ago, many people have maintained the Bench's decisions show signs of a swing to the right. Others have argued that there has been no change or that, if anything, the Court is more liberal than before.

This last group got more ammunition for its argument last week when, opening the fall term, the Court vacated a decision of the Florida Supreme Court. The state justices had upheld a Miami ordinance prohibiting Negroes form playing on a municipal golf course except on one day a week. The high bench, however, cancelled that finding and directed reconsideration "in the light of" its June decisions in the Sweatt and McLaurin cases.

Herman M. Sweatt claimed that Texas violated his constitutional rights when it refused to admit him to the state university, while McLaurin argued that Oklahoma's state law school had illegally practiced segregation against him. Both tried to convince the Court that separate facilities cannot be equal.

In the Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896) the Court had stated that since separate facilities were not necessarily unequal, segregation did not violate the fourteenth amendment. While the judges did not reverse the 1896 decision, they did declare that the facilities provided by Texas and Oklahoma in both cases were "unequal." So, although the Court did not re-examine the "separate but equal" doctrine, most observers felt that it would never again find separate facilities equal.

There are, however, other decisions that might be considered as showing a trend to the right. AT the same time it handed down the Miami decision, the Court refused to review an Atlanta censorship case. City officials there had prohibited the showing of "Lost Boundaries"--a picture dealing with racial prejudice--under an ordinance allowing exclusion of any film "adversely affecting peace, health, morals, and good order."

In one of its most controversial rulings, the Court upheld the right of federal officers to seize property without a warrant in "a limited area" during an arrest. The justices also denied the right of recourse to habeas corpus to aliens in U.S. custody ever seas, and at another time upheld the attorney general's right to deport aliens whose presence, in his judgment, was prejudicial to the nation's interest. Civil rights advocates termed the Court conservative when it refused to rule on a case involving the Georgia unit voting law which, those people feel, denies Negroes their voting rights.

Very soon, perhaps this week, the Court will hand down decisions on "loyalty oath" cases it took under consideration last term. One of these, the Bailey case, involves a woman fired for failing to "pass" her loyalty cheek. Thus, the entire federal loyalty oath program may come up for review, as may the McCarran law and the California state employees' loyalty oath.

Whether the Court is actually moving right or left is a crucial question, especially for these worried about civil rights. The argument on this point may not be ended by the Court's work this year, but the nation will be able to guess a little better very soon.