There are Persians living in East 58th Street. International House, near Columbia University, at Riverside Drive and 122nd Street, houses students and visitors from all sections of the globe and of all colors, shades and varieties. Men live in one wing, women in the other, and if the steel door which separates them, but is never locked because of fire regulations, is opened, a bell clangs throughout the building. (Hell of a Good Neighbor policy!) 11. BLACK GHETTO There were Negro freemen on Manhattan Island before the Revolutionary War. New York never was a station in the abolitionist underground. The race was represented by only a few scattered thousands at the beginning of the present century. The heavy influx began shortly thereafter in a drive by industry seeking cheap labor. Agents were sent to the South to recruit whole train-loads of black people to throw into unskilled work against the Irish, Italians and others who were already becoming troublesome to the industrial moguls with demands for higher wages. The pay spurned as too low by the whites looked big to the cotton pickers and ditch diggers of Dixie. The Negro population grew rapidly. So did the spirit of resentment and hatred which surrounded them everywhere, despite the Northern fiction of race equality. Not only were the Negroes driven together for protection against a powerful prejudice which kept their lives miserable and unsafe, but they found themselves caught in a ring, welded by small and big owners of real estate, which literally caged them in. The net result has been the most congested ghetto on the American continent--Harlem. In the tiny area of Harlem there is now a population of around 650,000--approximately that of the full census of Pittsburgh or San Francisco proper. There has been practically no new housing built there in decades. The crumbling firetraps, almost all of them still owned by whites, and many by millionaires, have seen little improvement in provisions for sanitation, much less for human comfort. But per room, the rents exacted often equal many in the luxury edifices of gilded Park Avenue. These thousands of dark-skinned people are truly displaced persons--held in a concentration camp surrounded by the barbed-wire fence of ironclad prejudice. But they attend free schools. They go to the polls. Therefore, maneuvered by slick politicians, white and black, they have become an enormous power. But little of this power is used for their benefit. Until some 20 years ago tradition and the memory of Abe Lincoln made almost every Negro anywhere a Republican. The Republican machine in New York took this for granted and counted in the Harlem votes automatically before the elections.