Tea and Prejudice

A few weeks ago a group of Cambridge ladies gathered at Phillips Brooks House for tea, but they didn't discuss spring fashions or the price of eggs. The PBH Housing Registry was trying to persuade these women, all of them landladies listed by the Registry, not to discriminate against minority groups. Despite such praiseworthy efforts to convince the proprietors they should fulfill their non-discrimination agreement with PBH, many have failed to cooperate. They list the prices of their rooms with PBH, but they may still raise the rent for Negro students, or tell them they have no vacancies, without openly admitting prejudice.

The simplest way for the Housing Registry to enforce fair practices would be to require landladies to list the number of their vacancies, as well as the price of each. If PBH would then encourage students to report all instances of discrimination, it could treat each violation separately. All landladies who refused to stop unfair treatment should be dropped from the housing list.

Many of these proprietors are largely dependent on PBH for their business because of the valuable free advertising to their rooming houses. If they knew that any discrimination would automatically remove their names from the list, the landladies would be more willing to comply with their PBH agreement.

As a religious and social service organization, Phillips Brooks House is certainly correct in opposing racial discrimination. The Housing Registry performs a most valuable service, particularly to graduate students and their families, by listing information on rooming houses in the area. But unless it can effectively detect discrimination when it occurs, the Registry is in danger of merely feeding numerous customers to the landladies so they can afford to discriminate against minority groups.