The Law School will host an NAACP legal Defense and Education Fund-sponsored convocation on "Equal Justice Under Law" at Austin Hall today.
The convocation, chaired by Mark Dewolf Howe '29, professor of Law, will nature speeches by leading figures in the fields of civil rights, education, law, and politics.
Speaking last night at a pre-convocation dinner at the Harvard Club of Boston, Jack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Leagl Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., criticized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for inadequate enforcement of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Title VI of the Act provides that Federal funds be cut off from schools, hospitals, and other programs which practice racial discrimination.
"The most alarming feature of Title VI." Greenberg said, "Is that HEW has virtually no staff to enforce it." Further more, he said, "there appear to be no plans to engage staff of adequate strength."
He criticized the department for investigation only one of over 75 complaints of discrimination in federally-aided health care facilities, and said that enforcement of Title VI is schools is even more tax.
Greenberg asserted that Title VI authorities should not approve so-called "freedom of choice" plans, under which school officials abolish formal school zones and tell Negroes that they can attend any school they wish. "In these cases," he said, "community pressure and the momentum of segregation will keep things entirely of almost entirely as they have been."
He also complained that HEW ignores the clear mandate of Brown vs. Board of Education, the famous 1954 decision outlawing segregation in the schools, when it allows systems to desegregate only four grades at a time without having to offer any reason for delay.
Finally, Greenberg charged that in areas where a school system is under a court order to desegregate, HEW requires no more than the court requires (no matter how little this may be).
He explained that since these orders are appealable, the resultant interminable litigation in effect exempts districts from Title VI.
Speaking at today's convocation will be Elliot L. Richardson '41, Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph L. Rauh Jr. '22, vice-chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, leader of a voters league in Selma, Ala., and Donald L. Hollowell, a civil rights attorney in Atlanta.
John Doar, Chief of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice; Robert F. Drinan, S. J., dean of the Boston College School of Law; Marian Elizabeth Wright, Legal Defense Fund attorney in Jackson, Miss.; and Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 march of Washington, will also speak.
