school education out of the Federal Treasury. These are amounts paid from 1950 through September 1957:

The foregoing figures show that over $224 million have already been spent in the eight States listed.

In order to prevent further abuses of the kind mentioned at the beginning of this testimony, we suggest that the following amendment be included in any bill reported out by the subcommittee:

No funds authorized to be appropriated under this act shall be paid to any State education agency or other State agency unless such State education agency or other State agency shall certify to the Commissioner of Education that such funds will be allotted only to schools that are operating in conformity with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States relating to school desegregation.

That concludes my statement, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BAILEY. The Chair would like to go back to that instance you mentioned about the Little Rock Air Force Base.

Was that particular school building constructed on base or off base in that school district?

Mr. MITCHELL. It is constructed off base, Mr. Chairman, but so close to the base that it virtually is across the street.

It apparently was arranged so that technically it would not actually be on the base although it would be very close to it.

Mr. BAILEY. Do they have a federally conducted school on the base?

Mr. MITCHELL. No, Mr. Chairman. The sole reason for building this school was to take care of the children who have parents on the base either as civilian employees or military personnel, because prior to the building of the school the children were scattered around in other parts of the county.

Mr. BAILEY. I take it that it is being built under Public Law 815. Mr. MITCHELL. That is correct, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BAILEY. Probably a combination grade and high school. Most of those federally owned bases conduct their elementary schools on base and then a number of them farm their high school children out to the adjoining district and the Federal Government, of course, makes a contribution to construct schools.

Mr. MITCHELL. That is what they have been doing, Mr. Chairman, They previously had a policy of building these schools on the base, that is for the elementary children, but since the executive agency established the policy that any school built on the base had to be opened to all children we have run into a lot of efforts to have these schools located off the base in order that they could be segregated. Now, I cited the Alabama situation, but the same thing is true in South Carolina, for example. At the Shaw Air Force Base they

have the schol adjacent to the base, but on some land that is supposed to be in the possession of the State of South Carolina.

This is an elementary school under present Government policy, it does not have to be desegregated in accordance with the regulations that govern the on-base schools.

Mr. BAILEY. It would appear, Mr. Mitchell, that you in a way have the cart before the horse here in that there is nothing in the impact school legislation, there is no reservation in there, limiting the expenditure of money such as you are proposing in this proposed amendment here.

So you are asking the Congress, then, to enforce a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. You must keep in mind that Congress itself never enacted any legislation having to do with the question of segregation. What happened there is that the decision of the Supreme Court grew out of litigation started by your organization. You are putting the Congress now in the position of forcing several elements throughout the country, we will say the proponents of desegregation, to pass additional legislation to carry out a decision of the Supreme Court.

It was always my thought that the Supreme Court's position and place in our Government was to interpret the statutes passed by the Congress. Since Congress never enacted that, you have a rather odd approach to the solution.

Mr. MITCHELL. I am one of those Americans who is under the impression that the Supreme Court in its decision was interpreting our basic organic law, that is the Constitution of the United States. I think that this is so elementary that it is really amazing to me that people would try to brush off the Supreme Court decision on the ground that Congress had not passed any such legislation.

I would think that that is hardly an arguable point, that this is not the law because it is a bona fide Supreme Court decision.

Mr. BAILEY. Do you think that the Supreme Court should write the laws?

Mr. MITCHELL. No; I think the Supreme Court should do what it has been doing in an honorable and constructive way, that is interpreting the Constitution and the laws.

So far as I know, ever since we have had a system of Anglo-American jurisprudence that has been the function of the courts so far as I know ever since they have been interpreting such laws they have been criticized for doing it.

Mr. BAILEY. Do you know that the Constitution of the United States provides within the Constitution itself the procedure for amending the Constitution?

Mr. MITCHELL. Yes, and I would certainly say that there was hardly any need for an amendment with reference to this decision. I think though, that the fundamental problem here, Mr. Bailey, is not that we are asking the Congress to support the Supreme Court decision; it is that we are asking the Congress to stop making itself a vehicle for undermining the Supreme Court decision because, as I have indicated here, failure to include these safeguards automatically opens the door for abuses and it is hardly fair to have the people who come from all areas of the country paying for the kind of defiance that we are seeing in some of these States.

For example, when the Norfolk schools closed and the money was not spent down there in Virginia, the Navy attempted to work out a program where it would give grants to individual children for education. This is the fault of the Federal Government, it seems to me, because Norfolk would not have had the money to support segregation in the first place if we had had the right kind of safeguards in the law. Mr. BAILEY. May I ask you to clarify your position; your testimony fails to indicate your position on the question of the legislation pending before the committee.

Are you supporting the so-called Murray-Metcalf bill, or are you supporting the administration's approach?

Mr. MITCHELL. Our position has been, and this is again a convention position, that we favor Federal aid to education. We would not want to pin it down to any particular bill. We would say that if the committee comes out with a constructive piece of legislation that is going to give some assistance to schools and that represents a meeting of the minds, then it certainly would be a wonderful thing, and we would strongly support it.

On the other hand, we just cannot believe any kind of bill, whether it is the Metcalf bill, the Thompson bill, or the administration proposal, ought to come out without some kind of safeguard in it.

Mr. BAILEY. What you are doing is asking the committee in whatever legislation it reports to carry this provision affecting the distribution of the money?

Mr. MITCHELL. That is right, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BAILEY. Mr. Brademas?

Mr. BRADEMAS. Mr. Chairman, I have a number of questions that I would like to ask of our distinguished witness here this morning.

First, let me say I am happy to be a member of the NAACP, Mr. Mitchell. I think I have the right to say I am the first white person to have been a member of the junior branch of the NAACP in my city.

İ, also, in college days, was a volunteer worker at the Negro Community Center in South Bend, Ind., and I am rather strong on this civil rights issue.

As a matter of fact, so strong that I from time to time get abusive letters from some of my constituents who do not see the problem the same way that I do.

So, I want to get that on the record.

At the same time, I am a little bit concerned about the approach that is being suggested by our organization here, a civil rights rider as it were, for the reason that I am sure you will readily understand. Let us go back to the 84th Congress, when, as I recall, this matter came up on a school construction bill then. I remember very well, whether it was in 1953 or 1954, a number of Members of Congress from my part of the country, including the Congressman against whom I ran in 1954, very piously voted for civil rights. They voted for the civil rights rider on the school bill.

Then, I think-and this is only from memory-about 65 of these midwestern Congressmen from a party which shall be nameless, turned right around after the civil rights rider was attached to the school construction bill and voted against the bill.

Now, this seemed to me to be a case of political hypocrisy the purpose of which was not to advance the cause of civil rights, but to kill the school construction bill.

I think you will agree with that analysis.

Now, just yesterday it happened that I talked to a distinguished Negro leader from my own congressional district. I said, "This week we are going to hear Mr. Mitchell of the NAACP come in and talk to us about the position of his organization on school construction."

I said, "I am concerned about this problem because it seems to me if we get a civil rights rider on the bill for objectives which I fully 100 percent share, we will do a good job of killing the bill." And it will be a bipartisan slaughter, too, as I have already indicated from my earlier example. The Negro leader from my district told me he was opposed to a civil rights rider on the school construction bill.

So, I would have two questions which I would like to put to you: First, if the NAACP had a choice between a school construction bill-and we will not get into whether it should be the administration bill or the Murray-Metcalf bill, or whose bill it should be, but some sort of bill providing for Federal assistance to aid education in some way, let us assume school construction only, and forgetting the question of teachers' salaries for the moment-if the NAACP had a choice between a school construction bill without a civil rights rider that would pass and a school construction bill with a civil rights rider that would not pass, what do you think?

Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. Brademas, I certainly want to thank you for saying what you did about your membership in the NAACP because so many people don't realize that our organization is not an organization of Negroes, but it is interracial. A lot of people don't realize that even if there is a disagreement of things, honest disagreement among us and we manage to love each other nevertheless, even though we do not agree.

I was trying to find the particular resolution which was passed at our convention for the purpose of answering your question as best I can, based on what our position is. Here is what the resolution states, which was passed at our July 1958 convention with reference to Federal aid to education:

Be it resolved, That we favor Federal aid to education, but that we oppose the use of tax money to build, operate, or expand racially segregated schools. The only bill we will support in this field is one that contains a provision barring the use of Federal funds in areas that operate schools in defiance of the May 17, 1954, and May 31, 1955, decisions of the United States Supreme Court barring segregation in the public schools; be it further

Resolved, That the Federal Government should extend emergency funds to school districts where State and local funds have been withdrawn because of compliance with the Supreme Court decision of 1954.

So I would say as best I can interpret that resolution we would not want to support a bill that does not contain that safeguard.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Of course, there you have the problem, and I think I am asking it to you very candidly, that you are putting some of your friends in a position where any way we go we are not going to be able perhaps to have schools.

In other words, we are not going to have any schools to desegregate. I think you are aware of that. I do not know that there is any easy answer for it, but I bring it up.

Mr. MITCHELL. First, I don't agree with your analysis of the defeat of the education bill, I think it was in the 84th Congress. There was a fundamental disagreement between members of the Republican Party and members of the Democratic Party on what kind of bill there ought to be.

There were some people, like the chairman of this subcommittee, who believed so much in education that they were willing to vote for whatever bill looked like it had a chance to pass and although the chairman opposed the desegregation amendment he nevertheless was among those who voted for the bill, or tried to get before the House a bill which would represent something constructive.

There are other people who had such strong feelings about not wanting to support anything but the administration bill, or not wanting to support anything but the bill of the Democratic Party, they would rather see it go down in defeat than to vote for it.

I really believe it is not quite accurate to lay the whole burden on the antisegregation amendment in that situation.

Mr. BAILEY. Let the Chair interrupt there. The gentleman has referred to the chairman of this subcommittee. My position is just where it was, Mr. Mitchell, and has been all along.

The need for classrooms is so great that I am not concerned whether they be white classrooms, colored, or mixed classrooms.

We have to have classrooms. This matter of who occupies them after they are built should not be injected right at this point. We still need the classrooms regardless of whether they are white, colored, or mixed.

Mr. MITCHELL. I understand that is your position.

What I was saying, Mr. Chairman, as I remember in that vote the bill which the House had an opportunity to vote on did contain an antisegregation amendment which you opposed, but even though it was put into the bill you, nevertheless, voted for the bill.

I was only pointing out that if other people had been as faithful to the principle of Federal aid as you have been, even though we are in disagreement on this amendment, I honestly do not believe that the bill would have been defeated.

Mr. BAILEY. Well, for the benefit of the gentleman, may I remind him that all of the Democrats north of the so-called Mason-Dixon line except four voted against the motion to strike out the enacting clause. The gentleman from Indiana touched on it.

What happened was that it was a combination between the so-called 94 Dixiecrats and the Republican organization headed by Mr. Halleck that defeated the bill. Forty-five of the opposition party voted to include the amendment that you are advocating here today and on final passage they reversed themselves and voted against the passage of the bill.

The Dixiecrats ran off the floor at the amendment stage and did not vote against your amendment because they knew it would kill the bill or they figured it would kill the bill if they stayed off the floor and let the amendment be tacked on.

So they hid out in the cloakroom and did not come in and vote.