Give Take

Few aspects of U.S. life are so sensationally distorted by headlines as race relations; some foreigners get the impression that the whole problem is a struggle between Southern lynchers and Northern liberals. In fact, race relations in the U.S. are changing through thousands of half triumphs, ugly little setbacks, unrecorded concessions and tentative changes in attitude which seem slowly to be spelling advancement. Last week:

P: The Richmond Academy of Medicine voted to delete the word "white" from the membership provisions of the Medical Society of Virginia. The poll was part of a five-year effort to open the Medical Society to Virginia's 146 Negro doctors (who are not eligible for membership in the American Medical Association as long as they are barred from the state society) and will probably influence other local medical groups among the 45 which must also take part in the decision.

P: Faced with a federal court ruling that Negroes must be admitted to the Kansas City (Mo.) Swope Park swimming pool, the city's park board voted unanimously not to open the pool at all.

P: A plaque "in memory of white men of Charles City County [Va.] who gave their lives in World Wars I & II" was banned from the county courthouse by local authorities as "discriminatory" because it omitted the names of one Indian and ten Negro veterans. The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had sponsored the memorial, held a dedication service for it anyhow. "If anything, we are being discriminated against," said a chapter member. Chapter President Mrs. A. G. Copland added: "We thought the colored people would like to recognize their servicemen with a plaque of their own."

P: Judge Hugh Taylor of rural Monticello, Fla. dismissed a hundred prospective jurors who had been called for the murder trial of two Negroes and ordered a new panel, which includes four Negroes--the first break from the county's traditional practice of barring Negroes from jury lists.

P: The mayor of Alhambra (pop. 52,753), Calif, presented a big bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Nobuko Coronel, Filipino-Japanese war bride of a hometown veteran, to help convince her that she was welcome in the U.S. The greeting ceremony was arranged (and more than 70 citizens were moved to write letters of welcome) after a local citizen had sent her a note condemning her marriage to Corporal Robert A. Coronel and warning her that she was not wanted in Alhambra.

P: Austere, exclusive Groton school at Groton, Mass., which prepared Franklin D. Roosevelt and hosts of other rich & famous men for college (generally Harvard), arranged to admit a Negro boy as a student for the first time in its 68-year history.

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