To the editor:

As something of a historian of student co-ops at Kansas University, I’d like to add a bit of history to your article “Student housing co-op seeks third house,” (Oct. 21). KU Student Housing Assn. was incorporated in the spring, 1941, not in 1938, as perhaps implied in your article.

The possible confusion on dates arises because students organized the first cooperative house during the 1938-39 school year — with the support of the campus YMCA and the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist ministry of students. It opened as the Jayhawk Co-op in the fall of 1939 at 1614 Ky. A second house, called the Rock Chalk Co-op, opened at 1409 R.I. in the spring of 1941.

A nonprofit corporation was then created to tie the two houses together. Although named the KU Student Housing Assn., it was not part of the university. However, with the exception of George Docking (president of the Lawrence First National Bank), all incorporators had university connections: Hilden Gibson (instructor in political science and sociology), Paul B. Lawson (dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences), John J.O. Moore (executive secretary of the campus YMCA), Fred S. Montgomery (secretary of the Bureau of Visual Instruction), and Henry Werner (adviser to men and associate professor of chemistry). The four student incorporators included Paul Gilles, now professor emeritus of chemistry.

It should be noted that the Jayhawk Co-op became the first interracial house for students at the university when, in November 1944, it admitted to membership I. Wesley Elliott, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Fisk University at the time of death. The university first admitted African-American women to the residence halls in 1951. The date African-American men were first admitted in unclear, but it was sometime after World War II.

John L. Eberhardt,

Denver