The Back Stairs

For the past 15 years the C.I.O.'s President Philip Murray has been a regular boarder at Washington's fashionable Hotel Carlton, one of the capital's best addresses and a place the President has often used for official entertaining. But last week, callers were politely told that Mr. Murray was no longer registered at the Carlton. Murray had moved across the street and down the block to the Hay-Adams, and for a reason.

The reason was George Weaver, a Negro who is director of the C.I.O.'s Committee to Abolish Discrimination. A couple of months ago, Weaver went to a party at the Carlton with the C.I.O.'s Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey. When they left the party, the elevator operator refused to take Weaver down: he would have to use the back stairs.

Carey insisted. The operator summoned an assistant manager and the house dick. They were adamant. Weaver and Carey walked down the back stairs together. Said the Carlton's manager: "We do not permit [Negroes] in here. Our guests . . . do not want to meet them in the halls." Murray moved out.

The Hay-Adams does not encourage Negro guests either (it asked the N.A.A.C.P.'s white-skinned Walter White to leave after learning from a news story that he was a Negro), but it had "no objection to Murray's colored lieutenants meeting him here." Explained Manager Marshall Jones with careful explicitness: "Mr. Murray can greet them in the lobby and they can accompany him in the elevator to his suite. Undoubtedly, he will wish to bring them back to the lobby when they leave."

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