My work in and commitment to the civil rights movement is well known. I have had the opportunity to review Mrs. Bradford's testimony and feel it im portant that I advise you and the committee of my total disagreement with her conclusions.

I believe the need for the United States Commission on Civil Rights is greater now than at any time in its history. I urge you and your committee to continue the authorization for this very timely and responsible Commission. It is imperative that the efforts to recognize the importance of all individuals be continued and that the emphasis on human rights not be allowed to diminish. Without the presence and efforts of the Commission, this important task would be severely hampered.

DEAR SENATOR BAYH: As one member of the Board of Education of the Denver Public Schools I would like to add another voice in support of the continuation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The agency is probably more important now than at any time since its inception. Complacency and preoccupation with other obligations can too easily become a way of life for all of us in elected office. The function of the commission as a watchdog of individual rights is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society.

Indeed, if it is to truly perform its function, the funding should be increased to provide adequate staff who are frequently overextended.

Sincerely,

VIRGINIA P. ROCKWELL,

Vice President.

Senator BAYH. Our next witness is Mr. William Taylor of the Center for National Policy Review.

Mr. Taylor, we appreciate your being here.

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM L. TAYLOR, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY REVIEW, CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA SCHOOL OF LAW

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am director of the Center for National Policy Review, which is a public interest law group specializing in civil rights issues, located at the Catholic University Law School.

I appreciate your invitation to testify on the legislation before you. In the interest of disclosing possible biases on this legislation, I should also tell you that I was a staff member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1961 to 1968, serving as general counsel of the agency from 1963 to 1965, and a staff director from 1965 to 1968.

You have had an interesting dialog here this morning on the subject of school desegregation. I would like to touch upon that a little bit as I go along, but I would like to devote some early remarks to the Commission as a whole and to the role that it serves.

My support for this legislation is not based on any sentimental attachment for the past but my view that the Commission has a vital role to play in the coming years in achieving the unrealized goal of equality of opportunity.

It is true, of course, as you know, that when the Commission was established for a 2-year term as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, it was viewed by many in Congress as meeting a temporary need, and some people may feel that two decades of operation is a long tenure for a transitory agency. It is also true that bureaucracies tend to grow stale and to perpetuate themselves long after the time for fulfilling their original mission has passed. For this reason, I think it is healthy that Congress is taking a careful look at the Commission's operations now, as it has done periodically, and requiring the agency to demonstrate not only that it has made a contribution in the past but that it has an important function in the future. Parenthetically, I might add that I think it would be useful if other Federal agencies of the Government were subject to the same type of periodic review and reexamination.

But, when this committee completes its review, I believe you will conclude that the Civil Rights Commission serves two purposes which, though somewhat changed in character over the years, are as vital now as they have been in the past. The two functions are, one, the investigation of the progress of the Nation in achieving equality of opportunity in such critical areas as education, jobs, and housing, and of the extent to which discrimination remains a barrier to individuals seeking to fulfill their potential, and, second, monitoring the performance of other Federal agencies charged with implementing civil rights laws and making recommendations for improved enforcement.

There may be many issues on which the need for facts can be met by special commissions which do their job and then go out of business. But civil rights, as I think some of the testimony here this moring demonstrates, is not one of them. Racial discrimination has been an endemic and divisive fact of American life from the beginning of our Republic.

While great progress has been made in recent years, racial practices still threaten our professed ideals and stand as a barrier to the achievement of important national goals.

How, for example, can the Carter administration succeed in developing an urban policy that will revitalize cities unless racial obstacles are identified and means are found to overcome the fears that affect both whites and blacks? If we cannot face up to them, I think we are going to have a very difficult time creating urban areas that are liveable for everybody.

Other forms of discrimination based on sex, national origin, age, or handicapped status are also deep rooted and in some cases national concern about these problems has surfaced so recently that there is much to be done simply in gathering the basic facts.

Congress is not adequately equipped to do the investigative job alone. While legislative oversight in civil rights has improved significantly in recent years, there is no committee to the Congress whose agenda is clear enough to permit the sustained attention that is needed. Many of the most constructive oversight hearings-for example, then-Senator Mondale's 1970 inquiry into equal education opportunity and Representative Hawkins' continuing review of fair employment practices have been fueled by information gathered by the Commission on Civil Rights, even though they have other sources of information as well, obviously.

Nor can the investigative job be done adequately by executive departments and agencies that are responsible for enforcing particular civil rights laws. The reliability of assessments made by EEOC, the Justice Department, HEW, and HUD is colored on the one hand by a need to make their own programs look good and on the other hand by a need to justify their budgets, which is to say there are a lot of problems remaining with which they have to deal.

Moreover, the Commission has attributes these agencies lack. It can examine problems whole rather than in narrow form, analyzing, for example, the relationship between educational barriers and job discrimination, or housing discrimination and access to jobs. It can also bring to bear where needed the compulsory process authorized by statute to get at the facts.

The Commission's role in monitoring the implementation of Federal civil rights laws is equally important. With passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crucial focus of decisionmaking is now in the two dozen executive agencies that are charged with enforcing the laws. How these agencies perform their functions can have an impact on the lives of millions of citizens.

At the same time, civil rights law has become extraordinarily complex. There are issues of administration: What is the appropriate use of racial data as a compliance tool? How can Federal agencies discipline their internal processes to deal with the problems of delay that pervade so many civil rights programs? There are sometimes months or years of delay before a complaint is dealt with.

There are also issues of substance: What should be the standard for validating employment tests that have a discriminatory impact? In actual practice, have goals and timetables become rigid quotas or are they a useful management tool for employing minorities and women who have been discriminated against in the past? Why has the congressionally mandated policy of access to housing opportunity throughout metropolitan areas had so little impact as administered by HUD?

Has the school desegregation brought about by HEW's enforcement of title VI proven effective? How adequately is HEW addressing the so-called second generation issues in education such as language deficiency and the misclassification of children in classrooms?

All of these are matters that the Commission either has addressed in the past or which call for its attention in the future. To these issues, the Commission brings both expertise and a breadth of perspective that is not available elsewhere in the Federal Government or in the private sector.

I am certain, for example, that the Commission's work in assessing the effectiveness of the equal employment effort of Federal agencies has been of great assistance to the President's Task Force on Civil Rights Reorganization. The Commission has just put out a new volume on that question. The task force is presently considering a plan to reorganize the fair employment function.

Indeed, I hope that the Carter administration will come to recognize that it can make far better use of the Commission's research than it has done so far. For example, the Commission's series of reports on enforcement could be an invaluable tool for examiners at the Office of

Management and Budget in evaluating agency performance and making decisions on requests for appropriations. They are not making full use of that tool.

Similarly, the Commission's work is of great assistance to private groups concerned with civil rights. In my work with the center, and as chairman of the Compliance and Enforcement Committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, I frequently represent groups such as the NAACP and the National Urban League in proceedings before administrative agencies and in lawsuits in the Federal courts. The factual material provided by the Commission's investigative and monitoring reports often is of great importance not only to the parties but to the decisionmakers as well. Of course, in the adversary process if there are holes in that research, it can be subjected to a careful examinanation. Both sides can make use of it.

In carrying out these major responsibilities, I believe that the Commission has done its job well. In saying this, I am aware of the occasional charges, some of which you have heard here this morning, that the Commission is not "objective" in its reports. Such criticism, I believe, confuses objectivity and neutrality.

The question ought not to be whether the Commission is an advocate for the cause of improved protection of civil rights. It is, for the reasons you suggested, Mr. Chairman, because that is national policy. Rather, the issue is whether the Commission sets high standards of integrity and reliability in the processes it uses to determine the facts and reach its conclusions. I believe that it does.

It has been my privilege to work closely with the only three Chairmen the Commission on Civil Rights has ever had over its tenureJohn Hannah, Theodore Hesburgh, and Arthur Flemming. Each of these men came to the Commission from distinguished careers in higher education and in Government service. Each, I can testify from personal experience, has set rigorous standards of ability and honesty for the staff of the agency. And each, despite a lack of extensive professional involvement in issues of discrimination prior to service with the Commission, has become identified as an advocate for civil rights

causes.

When the Commission was established in 1957, its membership was so neatly balanced between northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, people who were identified as conservatives or liberals, that many people thought that deadlock in that agency was inevitable, that it would never do anything. Yet, to me it is an interesting phenomenon that the indepth exposure to problems of discrimination and deprivation that comes through the Commission's investigative and hearing process tends to make vigorous as well as informed advocates of people of generally moderate and sometimes even conservative temperament.

I have seen a similar process at work with some Federal judges in civil rights cases. They begin very skeptical of the claims that the plaintiff's are making. It is only after they have gone through that rigorous process, which in some respects is similar to a very rigorous investigative hearing, that they reach the conclusions that they do.

I sometimes think that if we could find a method to expose more decisionmakers and the mass of American citizens to the same factgathering process that has led Civil Rights Commissioners and Fed

eral judges to espouse or adopt legal reforms, we would rapidly solve the race problem in this Nation.

In any event, it might be a good idea for people who now assail the objectivity or integrity of the Commission or members of the judiciary to ask themselves instead what information these officials might have acquired that turned them from moderates to radicals, or whatever they are being termed.

It is a temptation to me to respond in some detail to what I would call the roundhouse right that was thrown by the panelists who proceeded me this morning. I won't do so other than making a couple of

observations.

First of all, you have indicated, I think, the quarrel is far more with decisions that have been made by the Federal courts interpreting the 14th amendment to the Constitution than it is with the Commission.

By way of further disclosing my affiliations, I am counsel in the Wilmington case, so it is a great temptation to respond to some of the statements that were made about the Wilmington case. I will limit myself to saying that there were findings of intentional discrimination in that case that can be quite detailed, if that is needed.

I will also point out that the Denver case has been up and down the courts for a number of years. It has been to the Supreme Court and was the subject of a careful decision, Keyes v. School District No. 1 of Denver, in 1973 setting out the acts of intentional discrimination that gave rise to the remedy in that case.

There was an interesting discussion of Tampa. I thought it was interesting that one of the witnesses said that, quoting the school superintendent, there probably have been increases in achievement that followed the desegregation process.

He went on to say that if there were gains, they might be due to changes in curriculum and the way the schools run rather than desegregation itself. Frankly, I don't much care whether improvement can be pinpointed to a single thing. The fact of the matter is that what desegregation often does is to stimulate the process of community participation and citizen concern about the schools that leads to changes in curriculum, that leads to doing things that are needed in the school system for all children.

I think that is what happened in Tampa, I think that is what has happened in places such as Charlotte-Mecklenberg. So you wind up a few years later with a number of changes that have come along with the desegregation process that have brought about real improvement.

You asked about the names of people who went down there and what the sources of information are. One very good source of information is the deputy superintendent of that school system, E. L. Bing.

I really haven't got the time and I assume you haven't got the time to deal with all of the broad statements that were made in various testimony.

Senator BAYH. Mr. Taylor, let me just say that I intend to deal with those. I do not think it is necessary to deal with them right now. Perhaps we can communicate with you later.

I would like to pursue this to see where the facts lie. It is easy to come here and make charges. I, frankly, don't intend to let this committee be used as a publicity lightning rod of some kind or another.