Education: Returning the Call

Some 50 Harlem Negro boys & girls spent two weeks in New Hampshire last summer, living with the white children, fishing, camping and learning to ride bareback on farm horses. Now eight sunburned New Hampshire kids were returning the call.

The New Hampshire visitors were as cowed by New York’s traffic and subways as their hosts had been by New Hampshire’s wasps and bees. They gawped at the Empire State Building, as the Negro kids had gaped at a herd of cows. They lunched together at an Automat, went to the Radio City Music Hall, and danced at 14-year-old Jean Kilpatrick’s Harlem home. On Sunday morning they all went to Harlem’s St. Philip’s (Episcopal) Church. These adventures excited them so that they didn’t realize they were having an adventure in race relations. That night eleven-year-old Fred Buker, who is white, and his roommate, Bobby Paige, who is black, had so much to talk about that Bobby’s aunt threatened to spank them both if they didn’t get to sleep.

The Rev. Mr. Bradford Young, then at Brooklyn’s Holy Trinity Church (Episcopal), first tried this experiment on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1925. He took a group of his young parishioners across the river to Harlem to celebrate the day with the kids of St. Philip’s. It worked so well that after Clergyman Young got a new parish in Manchester, he invited the Harlem pastor, the Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, up to preach. Mr. Bishop had heard of the Harlem exchange trips of Vermont’s Rev. A. Ritchie Low (TIME, Aug. 28, 1944), suggested that New Hampshire try it. Included in the gang: Mr. Young’s son Ernest, 13, daughter Beatrice, 10. Said Clergyman Young: “The only sensational thing about the trip was that there was absolutely no reaction of white children to colored. . . . They had a healthy, natural attitude toward one another.”