Housing Victory For U.S. Negroes

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30210, 15 August 1963, Page 9

Housing Victory For U.S. Negroes

(N.Z P A. .Reuter—Copyright)

NEW YORK. Aug. 11. Negro leaders today hailed as a major victory an agreement recently reached with the biggest landlord in the United States, an insurance company, to rent it* flats to all qualified Negroes, the Associated Press re-

ported. The firm, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, is the second, biggest company in the United States, with assets of 20.000 million dollars. It is the landlord to 34.170 families in the blocks of flats it has invested in or developed itself throughout the nation. Among these are several allwhite blocks of flats it owns in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, and in New York.

After weeks of negotiations between the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the company plus a representative of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, a joint N.A.A.C.P.company statement, referring to an exchange of views and the company’s reaffirmation of a "long-standing policy of non-discrimination,” was released.

A company spokesman said applicants would now be accepted for all developments without regard to colour and subject only to the company's normal standards of credit risk and gaod housekeeping. The talks began after Negro organisations threatened to picket three big Metropolitan housing developments in New York city.

James Hood, one of two Negro students recently admitted to the previously allwhite University of Alabama, had withdrawn tq avoid a complete breakdown

of his mental and physical condition, his lawyer said today. In Plaquemine. Louisiana, police arrested 25 members of the Congress of Racial Equality today when the mixed group of five whites and 20 Negroes refused to use segregated waiting rooms on a Mississippi River ferry.