No Room: I

Negro and foreign graduate students who hunt housing in Cambridge meet with a shocking amount of racial discrimination. After a disheartening search for lodging near the University, many Negro students give up and live in the city's colored district, over a mile from their classrooms. Oriental students as well encounter strange looks and hasty refusals from landladies who later take in white students.

No one has broadcast the problem. Individual cases rarely pass beyond the student and the landlady. The victims usually have too much pride to complain openly, and the discriminators--who happily are a minority of the rentors--don't talk about it either. The Housing Office in PBH can infer the difficulty from the fact that colored students return for help time after time, while white students rent the same rooms with no difficulty. Discrimination does exist, and it is a blot on Harvard's generally good record of race relations.

Over twenty per cent of the graduate student house-hunters are some other color than white. The Housing Office, which lists over one thousand apartments and 557 landlords, has valiantly tried to obtain decent housing near the University for all of them. This fall, the Office sent each landlady a note reminding them that discriminators were not welcome on the housing lists, but colored students kept returning empty-handed. Acting on its threat the Office has erased landladies who admit purposely drawing a color line from its listings. But such blunt cases are rare. For every bare-faced discriminator, there are ten who protest that "they wouldn't mind a Negro, but their tenants would."

Despite its concern, the Housing Office is clearly not equipped to enforce an effective blacklist of discriminators, because it hasn't the staff to investigate every apparent violation. Without such enforcement, the most severe pronouncement on the subject from the very highest echelons in the University would be just so many words on paper.

The most effective vigilantes in this situation are the graduate students themselves. Nothing would end discrimination more abruptly than a refusal by white students to live in private homes and boarding houses whose owners drew a color line. There are many more rooms available than prospective tenants, and there are many more enlightened landladies than discriminators. If some landladies stubbornly insist that only white men are fit to live in their homes, that is their business. But they should get no business from Harvard students.