Arizona Sun

Integration Favored By Adventists

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Seventh-day Adventist Church "believes in the integration of all peoples regardless of race," its world president declared yesterday in answer to a charge that an Adventist academy had rejected a Negro girl.

And a spokesman for the Mt. Vernon, Ohio, Academy denied the charge.

Donald W. Hunter, chairman of the board of trustees of Mount Vernon Academy, and J. R. Shull, principal, said yesterday the school has no policy against Negroes. They said it has admitted a Negro boy, Theodore Slaughter, 15, of Rome, Ohio, who is a member of a white church in the conference which supports the school.

World President Reuben R. Figuhr of Washington, newly re-elected to a third four-year term, told 17,000 Adventists gathered for worship in the Cow Palace:

"Sometimes a small group creates a situation that is not at all the denomination's point of view. This church believes in the integration of all peoples regardless of race and this has been its stand through all the years. In the world leadership...

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ship of the denomination, there is through integration in the world representatives of an organization's officers group with no regard to race."

He made reference to a charge that the church through its Negro conferences and Negro schools fosters segregation. The charge was made by Mr. and Mrs. Burrell Scott of Oberlin, Ohio, at a news conference Friday night.

Frank W. Hale of Wilberforce, Ohio, English department chairman at Central State College, said the laymen's leadership group of Adventists plans a mass meeting at 3 p.m. Sunday to make an appeal to church officers to end discrimination.