LINCOLN DAY DINNER 53

For the central matter of our day is the very same as that of Lincoln's
times — only we express it not in terms of civil war, but civil rights
... and. not as a freeing of slaves, but a realization of equal civil op-
portunity. We are today as yesterday a house divided, a nation torn,
a people discomforted by doubt and beset by fear. We are a hundred
years past the battle of Gettysburg but less than two years beyond
the insurrection at Watts. So much has changed, and so little.

Measurable change has been largely constitutional, legislative, ju-
dicial and, at times, plainly political. Indeed the Supreme Court of
1954, which opened the way for school desegregation and gave birth
to the movement for equal rights, was a far cry from the Supreme
Court of March, 1857, where that famous and otherwise liberal-
minded Marylander, Roger Brooke Taney, read aloud the Dred Scott
decision.

This denied that the Negro was included in the thought and pur-
pose of the line "all men are created equal" as inscribed in the Declara-
tion of Independence. Certainly the Congress which passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 is as far removed from its counterpart in 1864 as
the idea of people being thought of as people is from that of people
being considered as property.

And there has been no lack of energy on the part of our lawmakers
and judges in enacting and interpreting the case for civil liberties, al-
though we still need debate and have not wholly digested to our
satisfaction the findings in the momentous cases of recent years.

There is awareness and change, even though change itself is not
always swift and smooth or even acceptable to large parts of our
society. The Supreme Court in upholding First Amendment freedoms
in the school prayer cases — the 1963 Engel vs. Vitale case on official
prayers and the 1963 Murray and Shemp cases on Bible reading — is
under massive and organized attack. The Court is accused of favoring
pornography when it holds that Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer
cannot be constitutionally banned. The Court is held guilty of foster-
ing foreign ideologies when it disallows loyalty oaths for teachers and
public employees as "constitutionally vague. " And there are a host of
cases where the Court has been accused of obstructing justice by pro-
tecting defendants from unreasonable searches and seizures as in Mapp
vs. Ohio; by guaranteeing to defendants the right of counsel as in
Gideon vs. Wainwright; by holding that a state cannot compel a de-
fendant to testify against himself as in Malloy vs. Hogan.