Nation: In the Privacy of the Booth

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All the best people in Kansas City were for it. The evening Star urged its passage in front-page editorials on five different days. The Chamber of Commerce, labor unions and most church groups added their agreement. About the only organized opposition came from the Kansas City Tavern Owners' Association, whose president, Charles Geneva, predicted: "In the privacy of the voting booth, a lot of people will vote against this racial bill."

Geneva was right. At the polls last week, a majority of Kansas City's whites voted against a tough new public-accommodations ordinance. It won approval, and thus will become law, by the thin margin of 45,476 to 43,733 only because some 23,000 Negroes voted for it. In the city's largely Italian Eleventh Ward, the ordinance was trounced 2,455 to 426. In the blue-collar northeast wards, the margin of defeat was almost as great. The only white neighborhoods to approve it, and narrowly at that, were the wealthier country-club sections—whose residents rarely deal with Negroes, except as employer-to-employee.

The new ordinance broadens the city's existing public-accommodations statute, bans racial discrimination in nearly every place that solicits public business except beauty shops, barbershops, rooming houses and rental apartments. Unlike the old ordinance, which had no penalties, it provides for fines up to $500 and license revocation.