The Press: Admit One

Negroes have been elected (and admitted) to Congress, but never to its press galleries. Some technicality or other in the admission rules always kept them out. Last week a Negro journalist finally made the grade. By unanimous vote of its governing committee, the periodical press gallery admitted Percival L. Prattis, Washington correspondent of Our World,, a Negro monthly magazine published in Manhattan.

Another Negro was still knocking at the daily newspapers’ gallery, which had refused to open the door. This week the Senate’s Rules Committee would hear the appeal of Louis R. Lautier, 46, correspondent for the Atlanta Daily World. A fortnight ago the correspondents’ committee looked over his credentials, found that he also represented 36 Negro weeklies (there is no gallery for weekly newspapers). Lautier protested in vain that more than half his income came from the daily; the committee ruled that his “chief attention” was the weeklies. Lautier hoped the Senators would agree with Griffing Bancroft of the Chicago Sun, who cast the only dissenting vote and called his fellow correspondents’ decision “nothing short of outrageous. . . .”*

*For news of another Negro’s test case, see EDUCATION.