tions by the Federal Government itself against the developing conspiracies to violate the civil provisions of the Federal anti-Klan and civil rights statutes. I have set out these statutes from 1971 USC to 1989 in the appendix.

These statutes, first passed after the Civil War and then amplified and strengthened in the 1960's, prohibit any action or conspiracy to use violence or intimidation to interfere in any way with the exercise of constitutionally protected rights of citizens. They provide for the issuance of Federal injunctions against any activities designed to interfere with the exercise of these constitutional rights.

The Justice Department ought to know about this, although, as I have pointed out, they haven't brought a single action in the last 2 years seeking these injunctions, because in 1965 an injunction was obtained by the Justice Department in an action entitled "The United States Against the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," 250 Federal Supp. 330 (E.D.La. 1965, 3 judge court).

In a historic opinion written by Circuit Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an opinion incidentally which I strongly suggest every member of this subcommittee read-I would like to see every Member of the Congress of the United States read it, I would like to see every member of the Department of Justice read this opinion. In this opinion the Federal Court held that the U.S. Government had the power and the duty to seek Federal injunctive relief to restrain and stop Ku Klux Klan activities designed to harass and intimidate the black people who were demanding enforcement of their most elementary constitutional rights of equality, as well as white people in the South and throughout the country who were supporting their demands.

The opinion of Judge Wisdom, one of the most respected members of the Federal Judiciary, goes directly to the heart of the grave problem which was then erupting in the early 1960's and which has now reemerged in such serious dimensions. Judge Wisdom described the action instituted by the Department of Justice in these terms, and these are words I would like to see emblazoned in every court, every school, every institution throughout the country.

What did Judge Wisdom say? Judge Wisdom said:

This is an action by the nation against a klan. The United States of America asks for an injunction to protect Negro citizens in Washington Parish, Louisiana, seeking to assert their civil rights. The defendants are the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an unincorporated association; the Anti-Communist Christian Association, a Louisiana corporation, and certain individual klansmen.

And then in sweeping terms, which should be read from one end of this country to the other, Judge Wisdom sets forth the heart of the court's conclusion as to why the injunction requested by the Department of Justice had to be issued. What did he say?

In deciding to grant the injunction prayed for, we rest our conclusions on the finding of fact that, within the meaning of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, the defendants have adopted a pattern and practice of intimidating, threatening, and coercing Negro citizens in Washington Parish for the purpose of interfering with the civil rights of the Negro citizens.

I suggest the committee listen to these words of Judge Wisdom. He says:

The compulsion within the Klan to engage in this unlawful conduct is inherent in the nature of the Klan. This is its ineradicable evil. We, the Court, find that to attain its ends, the Klan exploits the forces of hate, prejudice, and ignorance. We find that the Klan relies on systematic economic coercion, varieties of intimidation, and physical violence in attempting to frustrate the national policy expressed in civil rights legislation. We find that the klansmen, whether cloaked and hooded as members of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or skulking in anonymity as members of a sham organization, the Anti-Communist Christian Association, or brazenly resorting to violence on the open streets of Bogalusa, are a "fearful conspiracy against society... (holding) men silent by the terror of (their acts) and (their) power for evil". (Wisdom opinion supra at page 334.)

Based upon these fundamental conclusions, the Federal threejudge court composed of Judges Wisdom, Christenberry and Ainsworth, issued a sweeping injunction against

assaulting, threatening, harassing, interfering with, or intimidating, or attempting to assault, threaten, harass, interfere with or intimidate . . . Negro citizens from exercising their equal rights under the laws and Constitution of the United States. For the benefit of the committee, I have attached a copy of this historic injunction as appendix C to this statement.

I put it to the committee, under the powerful principles set down by Judge Wisdom and the other judges of the fifth circuit in 1965, injunctive actions should be immediately brought by the Department of Justice nationally, regionally, and locally. No such actions have been instituted by the Department of Justice as of the present time.

It is essential to emphasize the lesson of the 1960's as to the central importance of such injunctive actions as a principal deterrent to Klan and other violent activities and threats against black and minority peoples. Such injunctions dealing with prospective conduct have the potential of performing an invaluable service in the first instance in educating and teaching entire communities about the Federal mandate against the perpetration of such violence and harassment.

Judge Wisdom's original injunction contained a mandate that a copy of the injunction-I will never forget the impact of this order upon communities throughout the entire country-be posted conspicuously at all meeting places of the enjoined organizations. The order was to "be posted at all times and during all meetings." Such orders are available to be publicly distributed in the hundreds of thousands of copies all over a town, a city, a State. They can become the basis for public meetings in schools, colleges, and every community organization. They will say loudly and clearly what needs to be heard from one end of this land to the other-that the wave of rising violence and intimidation against black and minority peoples is in total violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States and will be rejected and repudiated by every American committed to the deepest principles and promises of this country.

Moreover, the issuance of these injunctive orders permits an immediate and swift Federal legal response to any eruption whatsoever of such violence or harassment. Using the Federal contempt power and instituting immediate proceedings enforced by Federal marshals and the Federal subpena power offers a tremendously important opportunity to assert a Federal presence into every situation developing anywhere in the country in which such violence or harassment occurs. Once again this would accomplish the des

perately needed deterrent impact of a forceful, widespread public recognition of the fact that there will be Federal intervention to protect the equal rights of all Americans.

The apparent hesitation of the Department of Justice to follow the clear mandate of this Congress, of the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes and institute widespread civil injunctive actions which would have sweeping deterrent and educational impact must be immediately overcome. In the 1960's the department was similarly reluctant to invoke the Federal authority available in the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes. Only after the greatest pressure from civil rights organizations in the South, national civil rights, and civil liberties organizations throughout the country, and from national religious, labor, and civic organizations did the Department resort to the power mandated to it in Federal law to institute either criminal actions or civil injunctive proceedings against Klan and other organizations and individuals engaged in violence against black and minority peoples.

Once again we are at a crucial turning point. Faced with Federal governmental inaction, and State or local inaction or even sometimes complicity in such actions and harassment, in certain localities where this violence has erupted most openly, faced with this inaction, private citizens and their organizations using private attorneys, have brought actions in Federal courts seeking injunctive protection and relief.

A few examples are the Federal actions recently initiated in Chattanooga, Tenn.; Decatur, Ala.; Greensboro, N.C., and Wrightsville, Ga.

For the use of the committee, I have attached appendix D, describing these actions.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been deeply involved as private counsel in bringing these actions which seek to invoke the Federal power created in the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes.

In the early 1960's, actions brought by the Council of Federated Organizations of Mississippi, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress for Racial Equality, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, began the process of resurrecting the power of civil rights remedies. These actions are being pressed in these communities, but these actions must be the occasion for demanding that the national government meet its responsibilities under the Constitution and statutes of the Congress to invoke immediately the Federal power present in this two-pronged strategy based upon the existing anti-Klan and civil rights statutes. And I call upon the Department of Justice immediately to do what we did in 1965 when we brought a civil action against the conspiracy to murder civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss. and all throughout the South; what finally did the Department of Justice do? They intervened in behalf and support of the private people and the black organizations bringing those suits.

Let the Department of Justice come in and assist these actions immediately or we face a serious problem. The reluctance of the Government to enforce the statute is especially dangerous when it is juxtaposed to the frightening information revealed just this year

by the New York Times in what has come to be known as the Rowe Task Force Report. And that is what is so frightening.

These articles reveal that there is a secret report in the Department of Justice that they won't release to anybody and I hope this committee demands that report, revealing what, says the New York Times, is grave government complicity and misconduct in connection with episodes of Klan violence and misconduct in the past.

The Times has reported that four attorneys assigned by_the Attorney General to investigate charges involving one Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., a person this committee should be talking to, a former paid informant working for the FBI, that these four lawyers filed a report with the Department of Justice and this 302-page report reveals that the FBI knew about, condoned, and covered up its own informers' role inside the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1960's, who participated in and incited violent attacks upon black people and civil rights activists.

Two years ago in a report asked for by Senator Kennedy, the New York Times reported that they are hiding a number of conclusions. I give the committee some examples:

J. Edgar Hoover blocked prosecution of four Ku Klux Klansmen identified by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the bombers who killed four black children at the 16th Street Baptist Church here in 1963.

Second:

Mr. Hoover's office had also been informed that Mr. Hall (an FBI Klan informant) had once volunteered to kill the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Birmingham's leading black civil rights leader, as a part of a Klan assassination plot exposed by Mr. Rowe.

And yet the Department did nothing about this. The conclusions are enormous. We know just about the ones that the New York Times talks about. They have 302 pages of it. For example, they

say:

Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew about and apparently covered up involvement in violent attacks on blacks, civil rights activists and journalists by its chief paid informer inside the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1960s.

It goes on and on. Field agents told the task force, violence against blacks was "essential if regrettable to maintaining an informer's cover as a militant segregationist.'

The Rowe Task Force report apparently reveals many facts which raise grave questions concerning possible Federal governmental misconduct and complicity with respect to the Klan-instigated violence in the 1960's, including: (1) the deliberate blocking of prosecution of the perpetrators of serious racial violence, (2) deliberate use of informants with knowledge that such informants had a history of violence and continued to engage in violence, (3) failure to protect against and/or warn about violence against civil rights demonstrators which the FBI knew would occur, and (4) cover-up of the violent and criminal acts of FBI informants.

And I say to this committee, in the face of the revelation of the existence and contents of the Rowe Task Force Report-which I suggest this committee must ask for immediately-the recent announcement a week ago, on December 4, in the New York Times concerning new Justice Department guidelines allowing government informers to participate in some crimes while assisting in

Federal investigations, assumes potentially frightening proportions. They say that informers are not to engage in actual acts of violence. However, in light of the Rowe Task Force Report, it is important to determine, and this committee should ask, whether the new guildelines sanction participation by informers, like Rowe, in the crimes of planning and instigating acts of violence in violation of the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes.

And in light of these startling revelations, what are the conclusions to be drawn concerning the recent indications that an agent of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as well as a Greensboro police informant, participated in the planning and carrying through of the recent shootings and murders of the antiKlan demonstrators in Greensboro at the November 3, 1979 rally? Incredible.

These indications of governmental misconduct and complicity in the instigation and perpetration of violence and harassment against black and minority peoples are especially serious within the framework of governmental failure and reluctance to fully enforce the Federal remedies in the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes.

The inference begins to emerge, and there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people throughout the country who begin to believe that the Federal Government is committed to looking the other way, if not actually, quietly approving this course of conduct when the violence against black and minority peoples occurs. You have this national news about government complicity and failure to enforce the statutes. What are the people going to conclude? It is essential that this dangerous illusion be erased at once.

There is the urgent necessity for an immediate full-scale investigation into and public exposure of any governmental misconduct in respect to such violence, including failure to prosecute under Federal statutes any such participation in or toleration of conduct condemned under the anti-Klan and civil rights statutes.

This committee should institute such an investigation at once and demand the immediate production of the Rowe Task Force report. The committee should inquire into whether there is any intention to prosecute those in the Government responsible for allowing participation of Government agents and informers in the instigation and perpetration of crimes of violence against black and minority peoples. Only such a full-scale public disclosure and prosecution of past crimes that are revealed, and prohibition of any such future misconduct, will restore any confidence that the Federal Government is in fact committed to the enforcement of the Federal laws guaranteeing the equality and freedom promised by the Constitution.

The problem being examined here today highlights the critical importance of the role of this committee. There is an urgent need at this moment in the Nation's history to unearth the remedies first fashioned by the Reconstruction Congress to meet the threat of planned conspiracies to undermine the constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom to all people in this country. There is a pressing need to educate the Nation and all its peoples that these remedies do exist and will be enforced.