Passing

Greying, blue-eyed Walter White, for 16 years executive secretary of the Na tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has a skin so light that he frequently has to explain that he is, in deed, a Negro. Last week, in the Saturday Review of Literature, Propagandist White talked openly about a subject many Ne groes are careful to avoid: the Negro who lives secretly as a white man. Wrote he : "Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear -- people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the 14 million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is 'passing' -- the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites. . . . Often these emigrants achieve success in business, the professions, the arts and sciences. Many of them have married white people. . . .Sometimes they tell their husbands or wives of their Negro blood, sometimes not. . . .

"Who are they? Mostly people of no great importance, but some of them prominent figures, including a few members of Congress, certain writers, and several organizers of movements to 'keep the Negroes and other minorities in their places.' Some of the most vehement public haters of Negroes are themselves secretly Negroes."

Touching on a similar subject, brown-skinned Nightclub Singer Lena Home told an interviewer from the Negro picture magazine Ebony:"The people who make me burn are the Negroes . . . who make .heir money off of Jim Crow and who won't fight it. Even worse are the Negroes . . . who hate all whites indiscriminately. . . . Negroes ought to have better sense than slamming a whole group at once."

Walter White and Lena Home could mark a note of progress in race relations last week. Harvard University's football team started a Negro tackle, quiet, 6 ft. 4 in. Chester Pierce, in its game with the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. It was one of the very few times a Negro had played against a Southern university on a field south of the Mason-Dixon line. Many in the crowd of 24,000 Southerners waved flags of the Confederacy; many of them also applauded Harvard's Pierce for the hard game he played while his team took a 47-0 walloping.

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