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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 6, June 24th, 1949.

Land of the Free

page 4

Land of the Free

In the very country loudest in its proclamation of its own "democratic way of life;" human beings of the same sex are forbidden to share a room because their skins are different colours. Yes, and in the universities, the bastions of reason and free thought!

At the same time as Estelle ran into the ban on mixed rooming among women. I was waiting for assignment to a room in a university dormitory. About 35 ur us, the others white, slept on cots in Villard Hall. Two weeks after registration, only myself and several footballers, who stayed for different reasons than I, remained. One day I asked a sponsor at the Veterans' dormitory when I would get a room.

"Just as soon as I can find a roommate for you." he said. A week later another negro student and I moved into a double room. During the second term my roommate left school. At a time when a number of students waited to enter the dormitory. I occupied a double room by myself till the end of the next term.

You may not see anything objectionable in the ban on mixed rooming. But I, as a negro, do. What ia it but a version of segregation? The doctrine of inferiority dies hard. We are permitted in the dormitories—a right we exercise with high regard—but not yet on equal terms.

A few days ago, a white student invited a negro to share his room. The two arc rooming together only with the permission of the dormitory supervisor, not with the approval of the director of dormitories. All of the negro students and some white are watching to see whether the ban will be officially re-imposed when word is carried to the Portland mothers who "put Estelle Allen in her place."

And why shouldn't (wo persons, each qualified to live in the dormitories, room together if both are agreeable? They pay the name money, eat the same food, and take the same course.

On The Ball?

Another aspect of campus life underlines the situation of negro students and citizens. Athletics have Carved out an exclusive and almost untouchable domain of their own in American colleges. In fact, many athletic departments take precedence over any of the academic departments. Because athletics have become a commercial venture, the capable northern negro athlete can usually win a place for himself" on a team on equal terms with whites.

Off the playing field, however, the discriminatory pattern reasserts itself for the negro athlete.

One of them described to me over his studies one night the way he felt about it.

"I have asked myself many times why I ever decided to go out for sports." he said. "Ask why I should continue to contribute something that offers only short-lived mental compensation off the field. I can't get away from this question when I'm constantly reminded that my association with other players ends, socially sneaking, on the field."

He snapped his book shut as he went on. "Sure, when the teams travel I'm usually accepted in hotels, restaurants, and so on. That's because I'm a team member, not because I'm an American citizen. Do you think they'd serve me and sometimes they don't any more than you, as a negro?"

"Sport" vs Freedom

Remarks about visiting negro athletes are indicative of the divided attitude to negroes on the campus. At the Oregon-Long Island University Basketball game some weeks ago I heard vile insults directed at negro members of the visiting team. These were not just ordinary expressions of excitement and school spirit. One of these negro players was refused service at a Eugene restaurant, I do not hesitate to mention, on the other hand, that many of the student spectators paid complimemts to the negro players.

To a negro student at Oregon the Cotton Bowl was a test of racial equality as well as football talent. In accepting the invitation to the Cotton Bowl, the University had a chance to show its regard towards its negro athletes but unlike Pennsylvania State the previous year which ruled that athletes of both races should eat and sleep together Oregon agreed to segregate its Play ers in accordance with Texan notions of civilisation and democracy.

Coach Jim Aiken and the athletic department secured the consent of the three Oregon negro players to submit to segregation slickly enough to rouse the envy of any big-time commercial operator. Between December 18. when Christmas vacation started, and December 24. when the team embarked for Dallas, the players were permitted to go where they liked. The three negroes went to Portland. Coach Aikin telephoned each of them separately. He in formed them that the athletic department had been unable to procure mixed accommodation for the white and negro team members. "It's up to vou to decide whether or not the team will go under the circumstances," he told them.

With the game only 10 days away, with 110.000 dollars and the schools' athletic prestige at stake, and with a "Bowl-crazed" student body to face, the negro players had no alternative but to agree to segregation.

The University administrators, of course, had no intention of putting civil rights before cash or the bigots of the State. And the coach and athletic department did not dare to present the no-discrimination or no-Bowj issue to an open meeting of the team.

Oregon poured democracy down the drain, where it is most of the time in America anyhow, and opened a new bottle of Jimerow you All, the American Century speciaL Oregon's 110,000-dollar cut of the gate receipts demonstrates that ideals rate high in the country, because ideals and dollars are identical.

White Souls?

Eesides the basic discriminatory patterns negroes must contend with the stereotyped prejudices that set them apart, and served to justify the perpetuation of inequalities. Sociologists are familiar with many of them negroes all.

Here on campus a few whites have told me in all seriousness that negroes make good athletes because of innate superiority of muscular coordination.

At a campus function not long ago, attended by several townspeople, a city churchman approached me with a proposition illustrating the negro stereotype—and discrimination. "Say." he questioned, "could you gel enough of your men on campus together to form a quarter?"

"What for?" I ask.

"Our church would like a negro quartet. You wouldn't be expected to join, of course, and we'd supply you with pocket-money," the recruiter said.

The ugliness of stereotyping lurks behind the pseudo-amiability of the mummy and granddaddy negro character assignments of white community. For the negro, life in not just one happy minstrel-show enacted to the appreciative applause of Caucasians.

An incident at the Greyhound bus station some months ago bears out this point. Two other negro students and I were buying tickets to Portland when accosted by a grimy Caucasian, who was dressed suitably for a rag-collectors' Jamboree.

Black and Boot-Black

"You guys think because you're going to college that you own the world," he said. "Just wait till you get out—we'll cut you down to size."

This uninhibited gentleman expressed a common, though usually not so openly displayed, sentiment. Displayed, that is, by word of mouth when we are present.

But the whites who think us degraded manage to advertise the fact in other ways. I feel that the black-faced, red-lipped sketch on the shoe-shine machine in a local college hall, expresses the general attitude towards negroes here and throughout America. Without doubt many white people think I should be a shoe-shine boy for them. I am "out of my place" as a student.

Those are hard, accusatory words. But I was asked to say what I think in these articles. You know now.

As for belonging to campus social organisations, a negro friend sums up the situation in four words: "Fraternities, what are they?" Yes what are they?

Liberty, Equality . . .

Fraternities profess to build on the "noble and potent principle of brotherhood." The completed structure rears itself as neighbourliness. "Good fraternity chapters teach it by the example of men learning how to live with their fellows; and these chapters do not fail to capture the respect of the campus, the institution and the public." say the apologists for fraternities.

Yet fewer negroes than you can count on your two hands belong to fraternities affiliated to the National Interfraternity Conference. Since the turn of this century the constitutions of many fraternities have contained non-Aryan and religious exclusion clauses. Where these clauses do not appear on paper, an unwritten gentlemen's agreement prevails.

Here, Jewish students have been forced to form an organisation of their own. Any complaint about exclusion from their lips would seem like disloyalty, so they keep quiet. But not a single negro belongs, or has ever, to a fraternity an this campus. Guilty brothers cannot enjoy brotherhood. Guilty brothers cannot be invited into the best society.

We negro students, though a precedent has been set by negro fraternities at white universities elsewhere, look upon suggestions for the establishment of a negro fraternity here with uncompromising disfavour. Negro fraternities mean submission to discrimination and segregation. They represent the ultimate In refinement of social ostracism. Negro fraternities are an extension of the Ghetto pattern.

(These articles will be continued in the next issue of "Salient.")