Another Slat Gone

When slender, white-haired Benjamin E. Youngdahl (brother of Minnesota's Governor Luther Youngdahl) came to St. Louis in 1945 as dean of Washington University's School of Social Work, he swore that in five years he'd "win an end to the ban on Negroes ... or go elsewhere."

By last week Ben Youngdahl had beaten his deadline. Washington's undergraduate school is still closed to Negroes, but eight were enrolled for the spring semester at the School of Social Work, and one more slat had been kicked out of the cultural fence which separates St. Louis' whites from its Negroes.

Youngdahl's victory was not quite so epochal as it would have been farther down the Mississippi. Ever since the Civil War, when pitched street battles ended with St. Louis in Northern control, the city has lived with a border city's uneasy conscience on racial issues. In recent years the St. Louis color line has been breached repeatedly by educators.

In 1944 Father Patrick J. Holloran, then president of St. Louis University, opened his school to Negroes; in 1947 Hoosier-bred Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter opened all parochial schools in his archdiocese to Negro children, silenced objections by threatening excommunication to malcontents (TIME, Sept. 29, 1947). Two St. Louis Roman Catholic colleges for women have Negro students.

Although Missouri law still makes segregation mandatory in public schools, that line may be weakening, too. Recently the Missouri State Teachers Association voted to accept Negro teachers into membership for the first time. Last week, St. Louis' circuit court was deliberating on the case of 20-year-old Marjorie Toliver, who had sued to be transferred from city-operated Stowe Teachers College (for Negroes) to the exclusively white Harris Teachers College, also city-operated. In Columbia this week, students were planning to poll faculty and fellow undergraduates on whether Negroes should be admitted to the University of Missouri.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.