A Matter of Decency

When the heretofore wide-open Club 100 refused to admit two undergraduates last week, Harvard was faced with its first taste of public racial discrimination within memory. Until last Saturday evening members of the College community were under the impression that decent conduct was the only qualification determining which public places a man could enter and which he could not. The announced stand of the management of the Club 100 now means that the philosophy of public segregation has taken root at one point in Cambridge and must be opposed by students and other members of the community who view this philosophy as a denial of basic human dignities.

The situation that has arisen out of this action has been complicated by the legal fiction of private status that the Club 100 has resorted to in defense. The private social club has every right to choose its members selectively, using any criterion it sees fit. But the abuse of this right by a patently commercial tavern, operating quite openly for private profit and not for the social benefit of any select few who gather there, must not be mistaken for a legal or moral case. While Harvard students and all comers receive the mantle of membership at the door of the organization, an fulfill the other obligations of membership by filing this charter in their wallets, the law of Massachusetts proscribing racial discrimination stands flouted and helpless in the fact of a direct violation of its spirit and intent.

But if a tavern keeper is convinced that white and colored persons cannot sit side-by-side in a barroom without running amok, let him learn that his patrons do not share this feeling. Let him learn that sound business practices do not run counter to the type of idealism that gathers all races together in a Harvard classroom, on a Harvard athletic field, and in a Harvard House. If he is worried about fights, let him learn that the real fight comes not when students sit down to drink, but when a student cannot feel the freedom of joining his friends ion public. Let him learn that the dollars and cents of his patrons are on the side that is determined to combat the philosophy of racial fear, however, deviously coupled with the rights of privacy. The greatest thing to be protected from this error of judgment on the part of the Club 100 is the continued dignity of the colored citizen of Massachusetts, a dignity that is certainly not respected at the Club 100.

Students from all parts of the University, of all beliefs, have joined in a committee which new issues a call to boycott the Club 100. The members of the committee do not enjoy the prospect of overt acts of public pressure. But these men, whose names constitute a far-reaching cross-section of Harvard sentiment, fear even more the example of condoned prejudice that has cropped up so close to the University. It is for the men of the University to see that this racism is faced off and rooted out.