The Price of Prejudice

No one can measure the massive psychological damage America's blacks suffer from all the varieties of discrimination that they encounter daily. But now the courts are finding a way to put a price on some of the more blatant forms of bigotry. The Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld a $250 award for humiliation and mental suffering to a Worcester black who was refused an apartment because of his race. In a similar case decided last week, the Rev. William Gray, minister of a Baptist church in Montclair, N.J., won $500 for "psychological trauma" -- plus the right to move into an apartment that had been denied him in 1967.

California's Supreme Court has gone still farther, ruling that insult alone -- "intentional infliction of emotional distress" -- can constitute cause for legal action.

After a white foreman shouted angrily about "goddam niggers" to Manuel Alcorn, a black truck driver, and ordered him fired, Alcorn complained of nausea and insomnia. He got his job back, but sued his employers for $110,000. The California court upheld his right to seek damages from a lower court on that basis. Wrote Justice Louis Burke: "Al though the slang epithet 'nigger' may once have been in common usage, along with such other racial characterizations as 'wop,' 'chink,' 'jap,' 'bohunk' or 'shanty Irish,' the former expression has be come particularly abusive and insulting in light of recent developments in the civ il rights movement."

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