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Frank W. Ballou
Superintendent of Schools
Franklin Administration Building
Thirteenth and K Streets, NW
Washington DC

Mr. Charles C. Cohen
Chairman, Concert Series Committee
School of Music
Howard University
Washington DC

My dear Mr. Cohen:

Your communication of March 5, 1939 addressed to the Board of Education,
was recieved in the office of the Board on Saturday, March eleventh and pre-
sented to the Board at its meeting on March fifteenth and referred to the
Superintendent for administrative action in accordance with the action of
the Board on March 3 as to the use of the Central High School Auditorium
for a concert by Miss Marian Anderson on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939.

Your letter of March ninth contains the following statement of your position in this matter:

"Howard University gratefully accepts the use of the
Central High School Auditorium for its presentation of Miss
Anderson on April 9, but wishes it plainly understood that it
in no wise by acceptance of the use of the building, agrees to
the conditions or implications contained in the statement of
the Board of Education of March 3."

Certain of the conditions to which you refer are contained in a report
of the Committee on the Community Use of Buildings, (copy enclosed), which
was adopted by the Board of Education at its meeting on March third, reading
in part as follows:

"The Committee believes that a concession now, as a proof
of good will to Marian Anderson and the colored people of the
District, will serve to remove this question from public dis-
cussion, but only under positive and definite assurance and
agreement that the concession will not be taken as a precedent
and that the Board of Education will not in the future again be
asked to depart from the principle of a dual system of schools
and school facilities."

Briefly, the essence of there conditions is that the favorable action
of the Board of Education in approving the unusual procedure of granting
the use of the Auditorium of the Central High School to the School of Music
of Howard University in an emergency, should not be contrued as a
precedent and thereby establish future policy. Spokesmen representing
Howard University made these suggestions in their appeal to the Board of
Education for favorable action.