The Gary American

Washington University Students in Favor of Admitting Negroes

ST. LOUIS -(ANP) - Condemnation of jim crow at Washington university was expressed here last week in a student poll on the question whether Negroes should be admitted as students.

The poll showed that 130 favored admission against 85 opposers and 11 who were undecided.

The student poll was conducted by Student Life, the campus newspaper, which sent ballots to 400 representative students of all classes of undergraduates two weeks ago. Announcement of the findings of the poll came after the newspaper had chided the students in an editorial for their lack of interest, which brought response from 226.

Washington university, whose chancellor is Dr. Arthur Compton, atomic energy scientist and former University of Chicago professor, has been charged with abusing its tax exempt status as an educational institution for "the youth of Missouri" by refusing to admit Negro students and serving as a real estate holding company for heavily mortgaged pieces of valuable properties here, which has deprived the city of vast sums of taxes.

The tax-exempt institution, supported indirectly by nearly 200,000 local Negro taxpayers, began 46 years ago to purge itself of all Negroes, who up to that time were enrolled in all the school's departments. On April 30, 1936, Dr. M. B. Clopton, then president, was advised in a legal opinion regarding admittance of Negro students. He was told that the question of whether Negroes should be admitted depend-

Faced with the possibility of defending its real estate transactions in the case of Washington university versus Grunner before the United States Supreme court, Dr. Compton and other officials of the university also must face the issue of jim crow through the NAACP, headed here by David Grant. Local speculation has raised the question that the rich donations made to the university since Negroes were expelled may have been made on the condition that the institution remain "lily-white."