Assail Appointment of Negro, Who Attacked Jews, to New York University Position

Two Jewish organizations denounced today the appointment of John Hatchett by New York University as director of a new student center. Mr. Hatchett is a former Harlem school teacher who charged last November that Negro pupils in New York City public schools were being “mentally poisoned” by Jews. The criticisms were made in separate statements by the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, the latter organization urging the university to reconsider the appointment.

The New York chapter of the American Jewish Committee protested the appointment in a telegram to Chancellor Alan Cartter. The university announced that Mr. Hatchett had been named director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Afro-American Student Center. The AJCommittee said that “a man who, in his public statements appeals to racial and religious hatreds,” sullied his credentials and the institution and also “the memory” of Dr. King.

David Haber, chairman of the AJCongress Metropolitan Council, urged the Chancellor to reconsider the appointment, declaring it would be a “tragedy” if the center was placed under direction of “a person who has attacked Jews as a race.” The former Harlem teacher declared in an article in the Afro-Asian Teachers Forum that Jews “dominate and control the educational bureaucracy of the New York public school system and their power-starved imitators, the black Anglo-Saxons.”