Word: passport
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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William Worthy, a Negro reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, returned to the United States from Cuba on October 10, 1961. He carried a birth certificate as proof of citizenship, a landing card and a customs declaration. He had no passport. Following a brief interrogation by immigration officers he was admitted to the U.S. But the next April a Florida grand jury indicted him for entry into the U.S. without a valid passport, allegedly a violation of the McCarran Act of 1952. On August 8 of the same year Worthy was found guilty and sentenced to three months imprisonment...
...would be inimical to the national interest." He claimed the power to do this under the McCarran Act, which says in part, "After such proclamation [of a national emergency by the President] . . . it shall be unlawful for any citizen to depart from or enter the U.S. without a valid passport." Worthy has appealed his case which will be heard again this year in a federal circuit court. Doubtlessly there will be more people who seek to test the legality of a limit on the travel of Americans in peace time...
Louis Zemel, for example, has already challenged the ban without leaving his Connecticut home. Zemel, who already has a valid passport, applied to the State Department for permission to travel to Cuba. He cited his reason for going as self edification--a desire to inform himself first-hand of conditions in Cuba. In April, 1962, the State Department summarily rejected the application and subsequently turned down his request for a hearing. Citizen Zemel then sued the government for the right to travel freely to Cuba, naming Secretary Rusk and Attorney General Robert Kennedy as defendants...
...purpose to "foil leftist student's plans" to travel to Cuba. I firmly believe that the government has no right to consider political motivation when considering passport validation. Travel is a right, not a privilege reserved for those whose politics measure up to pre-determined standards...
Peacetime restrictions on travel are something relatively new. Before the 1950's, a passport was a sort of identification card, a request by one government of another to grant a citizen safe passage. In the past decade or so, however, passports have increasingly come to be regarded officially as permits to leave the country...