PRESS

This column is strictly for Northerners. Southerners read it at peril of their blood pressure and to no avail--for the subject is a matter of prejudice.

This week the Harvard Glee Club comes to Duke, our citadel of higher learning, to sing in the chapel, our symbol of Christianity. Both those who will sing and those who will listen are Americans, citizens of a nation now rising and flexing itself in preparation for the defense of democracy. Once in this land of the free, we proudly say, are men still able to sing; and only in this land resides the power of maintaining that freedom we so loudly land. Yet there is one member of the Harvard Glee Club who cannot sing, here at Duke, in the chapel. He is an American--he is educated--he will fight for his country--but he is a negro.

We all well know that moral issues are only camouflage. The Civil War was not fought to free the slaves; that was only a talking point for the North. The World War was not fought for Democracy; that was only a slogan for the Allies. And the present war is not being fought for the preservation of Sacred Ideals. . . . Nevertheless, how incongruous it is that we should all glibly prate such ideals. . . .

This Harvard Glee Club matter lowers the question from the abstract to shameful because a human being is denied by his fellows in a temple commemorating their common saint, a man who lived only that we may learn the Golden Rule--shameful because a man of dark hue is publicly shunned in a place devoted to the pursuit of truth and culture, a place where intellect raises man from his smallness--shameful because our motto so brazenly flaunts itself now, as obvious camouflage--"Erudito et religio!"--we have struck our colors, once more, to convention and prejudice! --Duke University Chronicle, April 4, 1941. THE HERMIT PLACE, by Mark Schorer. Random House, New York 1941, $2.50.