Atlanta Daily World

NEW YORK—(SNS)—Exclusion of Negroes from Stuyvesant Town, upheld this week by an Appellate Court decision, was today condemned as "indefensible" by Walter White, NAACP secretary. The lily-white Stuyvesant Town is a semi-public urban redevelopment project of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The Appellate Court decision re-affirmed a lower court opinion.

"Morally the Stuyvesant Town policy of excluding Negro citizens is indefensible," Mr. White said. Tax limitation involving money belonging to all the people, has been granted this corporation. Yet a part of the population, simply and solely because it happens not to be white is arbitrarily barred from occupancy of the apartment project thus created.

Action against the Metropolitan was brought by the NAACP, the American Jewish Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union and a number of other organizations on behalf of three Negro veterans whose applications for apartments were refused on racial grounds. Pointing out that the development was built with financial assistance of the city and state and that it received a 25-year tax limitation amounting to a fifty million dollar saving, the complaints charged that discrimination of any kind would have been unconstitutional if the city or state had built the project alone.

In refutation of the Metropolitan's claim that interracial friction would occur if Negroes were admitted, Mr. White cited the recent poll showing that 62% of the tenants favored the admission of Negroes.

In the field of race relations, stated Mr. White, "the people are far ahead of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It is as wrong in its estimate of public opinion on Negro-white relations as were those who estimated that Mr. Truman's civil rights program (which included a direct assault upon segregation) would cause his defeat. No. 2."

The NAACP and the AJC have announced plans to appeal the case to the State Court of Appeals and if necessary to the United States Supreme Court.