The traditional federal system may be incapable of dealing with the obstructionism of Southern state and local officials over civil rights questions, Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy U.S. attorney general, said at Boston College last night.

Speaking at the annual B.C. industrial and Commercial Law Review banquet, Katzenbach said a system which left the individual to enforce his rights against the government was "tolerable" only because of the assumption "that public officials will comply in good faith with these rights as interpreted by the courts."

Today, he went on, this system is being endangered by Southern officials who refuse to respect rights guaranteed by the Constitution and by civil rights groups which "through despair or ignorance of the federal system seek to invoke the power of the federal government to enforce personal rights."

He condemned Southerners who claim that the Supreme Court school segregation decision "can be relitigated in every school district in the country to see if the Supreme Court has changed its mind on the racial question.."

The Justice Department, he said, was constantly asked "to protect demonstrators... and get people out of jail... To tell these people that by and large they have to look to state and local officials to protect their rights sounds to these people like the height of cynicism... but to do anything else would be making major changes in the federal system."

The civil rights bill currently being filibustered in the Senate, he said, was an attempt to find a "middle road" between these two extremes. It would permit the attorney general to institute suits, a process already permitted in voter registration cases, preserving the process of enforcement through law suits, but allowing the process to be carried out "country by country" rather than "individual by individual."