RACES: Black Plum

First Negro ever appointed to the Federal judiciary was William Henry Hastie, whom Franklin Roosevelt sent to the District Court of the racially scrambled Virgin Islands (TIME, Feb. 15, 1937). Judge Hastie resigned this year to become dean of Howard University's law school (Washington, D. C.). Last week came a second dispensation of this politically potent plum. Senator James Michael Slattery of Illinois, who needs the big Negro vote on Chicago's South Side for re-election next year to the seat he inherited from the late "J. Ham" Lewis, got it for his former assistant...