New Governor

The Virgin Islands, whose 24,889 population is 69% Negro, got their first Negro Governor.

Witty, studious William Henry Hastie, 41, appointed by President Truman last week, has been dean of Washington's Howard University Law School for six years,' has long been a capable public servant. Born to a pharmacist father and schoolteacher mother in Knoxville, Tenn., he was graduated magna cum laude from Amherst, went on to Harvard Law School. There he became one of the few Negroes ever to serve on the Law Review, and one of Felix Frankfurter's Happy Hot Dogs.*

Harold Ickes made Hastie an assistant solicitor in the Interior Department. In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt named him U.S. District Judge in the Virgin Islands, the first Negro ever to sit on the Federal bench. As civilian aide to War Secretary Stimson in 1941, William Hastie pushed and prodded for Negro recognition in the services, finally got the War Department to set up the 99th (all-Negro) Fighter Squadron. Two years later, disillusioned over the Army's persistent segregation policy, he resigned.

Hastie will replace Governor Charles Harwood, a former Manhattan lawyer.

He will have his work cut out for him. Despite bounties from the U.S., despite war installations, the islands are still what Herbert Hoover called them when he visited there in 1931: an "effective poor-house."

* Washington's moniker for the Frankfurter proteges who swarmed through the capital in early New Deal days.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.