Foreign News: No Color Bar

Highly indignant last week were Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon and the Most Rev. Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of York, at what they considered a gross insult to William H. Heard, Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (U. S.). Bishop Heard, a grizzled old Negro from Philadelphia, one of 400 non-Roman Catholic Christians meeting in Edinburgh for a World Conference on Faith & Order, had been asked to move from his hotel.

Hearing of this, Sir John and Lady Simon promptly invited the Bishop to visit them in their Glasgow hotel where they are on vacation. Equally solicitous, the portly Archbishop of York asked Bishop Heard and his niece to stay with him. The aged Negro, who was born in Georgia eleven years before the Civil War, has had innumerable social and professional contacts with white folks, always travels first class on ocean trips, has attended 30 international religious gatherings abroad. He graciously declined the invitations, however, said he had already found another hotel where he was quite comfortable.

Edinburgh hotel managers, insisting that violent race prejudice is still largely a U. S. and German monopoly, pointed out their sole reason for drawing the color line: the presence of a Negro was likely to cost them some of their most profitable trade, the patronage of U. S. tourists.