Res Ipsa Loquitur

What was he? He was a lot of things: a Yale Phi Beta Kappa, a Columbia L.L.B., a first lieutenant in World War I's A.E.F., now an assistant district attorney of the State of New York--the information Francis Ellis Rivers put down in applying for membership in the American Bar Association was more than adequate.

Where the application blank asked "white, Negro, Indian, or Mongolian?" he checked "Negro." The application was neither accepted nor rejected. Nothing happened.

Then, -for pigeonholing his application, the Bar Association found itself under indictment by an angry grand jury of its own members. Led by the libertarian Arthur Garfield Hays, the indicters denounced the tabling of the application as "indistinguishable from the racial doctrines of Hitlerism." Several of the members, including Hays, resigned in protest.

Rivers went on waiting.

Last week, at its convention in Chicago, the Bar Association took up the issue again. The delegates voted a change in the bylaws. Heretofore an applicant was rejected if blackballed by two members of the Board of Governors (a body representing the ten U.S. judicial circuits--of which two are in the South--plus six national officers). Now four blackballs will be required.

The Board of Governors also voted into membership a Negro, Municipal Court Justice James S. Watson of New York City.* At its final session, the convention resolved that "membership in the American Bar Association is not dependent on race, creed or color." But Applicant Rivers is still waiting.

* The first to be admitted since 1912, when three Negroes (who were not known to be Negroes) were accepted.

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