When the African and Afro-American Association's leaders claim they are discriminating because of national allegiance rather than race, the hypocrisy of their words mocks the professed candor of their stand. The membership restrictions are as racial as racial as those upon voter registration in Mississippi. The viciousness of discrimination is not transformed because the discriminators are a minority: the Association's membership clause proclaims, in effect, that whites are less acceptable than others, and that only an act of justification, such as becoming a citizen of an African nation, can prove the worth of a person born with white skin.

Nevertheless, the issue is not the Association's right to exist, but whether it should be allowed to use Harvard's name.

It would be one thing to say that the University should pay no attention to the practices of club constitutions, and that recognition implies no kind of endorsement. The only reply to that argument would be that discrimination in an organization bearing the Harvard name inevitably reflects upon the University and makes the atmosphere of the University less tolerant. But the tortured logic of the CRIMSON's policy asks that the University condemn discrimination while approving this particular case. Having taken a stand against discrimination, the University could not just allow the club to exist; it would have to say that it had examined this form of discrimination and found it acceptable. Somehow, the authors of that policy have used the intellectual purposes of the club to justify discrimination, but valuing a person's intellectual contribution according to the color of his skin strikes at the very heart of an intellectual community.

The honesty of writing this clause into the constitution is exactly the honesty of putting segregation laws upon the books; it is not practical to stop covert discrimination practiced by groups like the final clubs, but it would be sad to conclude from that difficulty that Harvard should attach its name to explicit, premeditated, and flagrant exclusion based principally upon race.