NO
CRIME TO RETURN FROM CUBA
By Ruth Porter
NEW YORK, Feb, 23 ~- Thanks to the courage, tenacity and integrity of Negro reporter William Worthy, on February 20 the travel ban provisions of the reactionary McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nation-~ ality Act of 1952 were declared unconstitutional.
In a unanimous and history-making decision, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit United States Court of Appeals reversed Mr, Worthy's conviction and three-month prison sentence for re-entering the land of his birth “without bearing a valid passport." The Court rejected the idea "that a citizen, absent from his country, can have his fundamental right to have free ingress [entry] thereto subject to criminal penalty if he does not have a passport. ... The government cannot say to its citizen, standing beyond its border, that his re-entry into the land of his allegiance is a criminal offense," The Union of South Africa is the only other country known to jail citizens for coming home without a passport.
Mr. Worthy, foreign correspondent for the Baltimore (Maryland ) Afro-American, has long been challenging the constitutionality of the State Department travel bans, His passport was lifted in 1957 after he defied the State Department's ban on travel to China, Mr, Worthy rejected the Government's offer of a new passport if he would sign an oath promising in the future to abide by “geographical restrictions" deoreed by the State Department.
The present case resulted from Mr, Worthy!s “unauthorized" 1961 trip to Cuba, which is also out-of~bounds to U.S. citizens, Since © the charges filed against him on his return were the first brought by the government against a native-born citizen for re-entering the country, it is widely believed that they stemmed from the generally favorable news dispatches filed from Cuba by Mr. Worthy.
The Johnson administration is expeoted to authorize Attorney General Robert F, Kennedy to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Kennedy initiated the prosecution in 1962 while his brother was President,
The following statement to the press was released by Mr, Worthy after the Appeals Court reversed his conviction and sentence:
"Beoause of the growing agitation against the travel bans by newsmen, students, soholars and other citizens, I had long hoped that the Fifth Circuit judges would not blanch in the face of these arbitrary and unconstitutional exescutive decrees,
"T am happy that my optimism was warranted. It remains to be seen if, on the public's right to know and to travel, the Johnson administration will be more enlightened than its three predecessors, The rest of the world will be greatly heartened if President Johnson
gracefully drops this absurd and unprecedented criminal prosecution, Ho, Mr, Rusk and Attorney General Kennedy should proclaim that the American people, including newsmen, are free to go where they wish, in order to see for themselves what is happening in countries momen tarily out of favor in Washington.’