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JACQUELYN HALL:

What were the major issues that the student YWCA was concerned with? You mentioned anti-lynching legislation.

KATHARINE DU PRE LUMPKIN:

They had two major interests, not necessarily in terms of issues. Two major interests of a public interest kind, of an issues kind, were their interest in race relations, including student interracial commission work we got going, and the industrial conditions and industrial relations. We not only set up student interracial groups of Negro and white, we also established student-industrial groups. And I ran across a little thing there which I also seem to have not brought with me which dealt with how to make these groups more natural and give-and-take. It was very difficult to bring about easy, friendly and relaxed relations in student industrial groups. Usually these would be focused in a student group from a college in a community where there was a city YWCA so that there would be groups that would come out of city YWCA groups. I mean industrial women who would come out of that and sit down with the [student group]. So it would be an Industrial secretary in a city YWCA collaborating with, if there was a college or university there in the same, near or nearby community. Then we would go in as staff people and work with them to establish these collaborative groups. Then they would have exchange of students and industrial women at their summer conferences. This kind of thing. And then, in the college groups themselves, the local YWCAs in the colleges and universities, they would become interested in all the legislative issues and study them, advocate [legislation] if they wished to. And in our summer conferences we would always deal with important legislation effecting women and girls, child labor. These questions. Which could be dealt with through state legislation and through federal legislation. Minimum wage. All these issues of this kind. So I would say that… of course, it depended on the period.