The Milwaukee Leader

NEGROES SEEK RULING ON BAN OF RESIDENCE

WASHINGTON—Arguments were heard in the supreme court yesterday on the right of courts to enforce agreements among property owners designed to bar Negroes from their neighborhood.

The controversy reached the court in an appeal from a decision of the lower federal courts upholding an agreement among property owners on one of the fashionable residential streets of Washington not to sell lease or rent their property to Negroes for a period of 21 years.

Sold to Negro.

Mrs. Irene Hand Carrigan, owner of a residence in the block affected, sold it to Mrs. Helen Curtis, a Negro, and John J. Buckley, another property owner who had signed the covenant, took the matter into the courts.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took up the direction of the appeal for Mrs. Carrigan and Mrs. Curtis when their case was lost in the lower courts. Two of its directors, Louis Marshall of New York and Moorfield Storey of Boston, presented the oral argument against the agreement.

Decision Is Asked.

Mr. Marshall urged the court to hand down a decision which would serve notice upon lower courts that they must not enforce segregation agreements, while James S. Easby-Smith, counsel for Mr. Buckley, held that no question within the jurisdiction of the supreme court had been presented.

Mr. Marshall described the plan as the entering wedge of the Ku Klux Klan program of elimination which, unless restrained, would eventually extend all over the country, he said, and arouse passions and hatreds "between white and black, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and non-Jew."