The Justice Department last week issued a 55-page report rebutting charges made by a lawyers’ group here that the Reagan Administration had rolled back civil-rights enforcement on several fronts, most notably in the area of school desegregation.
The negative assessment of the department’s activities, released in September by the Washington Council of Lawyers, “undertook through misstatement, distortion, and the use of the half-truth to portray” the Justice Department’s civil-rights division “as insensitive, ineffective, and ‘in retreat,’” William Bradford Reynolds, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in the introduction to the report.
He added that President Reagan’s reaction last September “to such empty political rhetoric” provided a fitting response to the council’s report: “No matter how you slice it, [it’s] still baloney.”
The lawyers’ group accused the Administration of failing to develop and put into practice cohesive civil-rights policies and of “rolling back guarantees thought to be inviolate.” The report cited as an example the fact that the Justice Department had failed to file a single school-desegregation suit during the Administration’s first 20 months in office.
The department’s response countered that such allegations create “highly misleading impressions.”
“New case filings are not the sole measure of” an Administration’s willingness to seek the advancement of school desegregation, the re-port noted. “If case filings were to be the sole benchmark, we note that in its first 21 months the Carter Justice Department filed a grand total of two cases.”
The department noted that since coming into office its officials have:
- Participated in a total of 40 ongoing desegregation cases and have negotiated 10 consent decrees to require the desegregation of elementary and secondary schools in areas including St. Louis, South Bend, Ind., and Port Arthur, Tex.
- Participated in eight cases in which decrees were entered by federal courts following hearings. School systems involved in those cases included East Baton Rouge Parish, La., Rapides Parish, La., and Lubbock, Tex.
- Started preparing for new school-desegregation trials in Yonkers, N. Y., Charleston, S. C., the Big Spring Independent School District in Texas, and Marion County, Fla.
The department also said that the Administration’s opposition to mandatory busing does not mean that it also opposes school desegregation.
“The remedy to be fashioned in school desegregation cases present a highly charged issue about which people can and do legitimately disagree,” the department said.
“Unfortunately, the authors [of the lawyers’ report] chose not to engage in honest public debate, but to undertake to expand the disagreement over mandatory busing into a wholesale accusation of indifference to law and dereliction of duty,” if continued. “We believe that creative and effective alternatives to busing do exist, and where the law requires desegregation, it can be accomplished without the use of that most divisive and unproductive remedy.”
“While this record would impress the neutral observer as an active and viable enforcement program, the [lawyers’ council] lets its biases show by fabricating, instead, a gloomy assessment of inaction, lack of interest and backsliding,” the report said. “To do so, the report ignores the activity in the courtroom, misstates the facts as to several cases, and claims that since there have been no new cases initiated, there must be intentional neglect.”
Mr. Reynolds also reprimanded the news media for their coverage of civil-rights issues during the first 21 months of the Reagan Administration, saying they report “sensational charges of ‘retreat’ and ‘roll back’ purporting to be ‘well-documented’,” without covering “responsible [replies] that expose the falseness of the original charges.”
“In this instance, we believe that the public has a ‘right to know’ the facts, rather than be left with false impressions created by press reliance on a continued misstatement,” Mr. Reynolds said.
