Civil Rights Lobby to Campaign Against Top Court Decisions

Civil rights groups and their supporters will mount a mass lobbying campaign to overturn a series of Supreme Court decisions limiting affirmative action, NAACP President Benjamin Hooks said today.

But Hooks said “it will be very difficult to write legislation that will close all the holes” left by rulings earlier this year that undermine affirmative action programs and make racial discrimination more difficult to prove.

Hooks, at a news conference kicking off the annual meeting of Blacks in Government, criticized the conservative majority on the Supreme Court as “more dangerous than Bull Connor, Jim Clark and George Wallace”--Southern officials who opposed, sometimes with violence, the civil rights movement of the 1960s.