COLOUR ISSUE JOINED

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5317, 1 February 1947, Page 4

COLOUR ISSUE JOINED

fjpHE United States is at last j face-to-face with a fundamental issue that it has birked for 80 years — the citizen rights of the Negro. Paul Robeson has announced that he will devote the next two years of his life to breaking down the race barriers, economic and social, that confine his people. Another great artist, Marianne Anderson, has been in the same campaign in a less spectacular way for many . years. A group of playwrights have refused to allow their plays to be produced in Washington unless Negroes are admitted. Many^coloured folk were emboldened to testify against the subterfuges and intimidation that sought .to prevent them from exercising the franchise in the recent elections. It has been stated that only some 400 out of over 55,000 Negroes in one Tennessee county registered their votes. The "Jim Crow" cars of the southern States have been declared illegal by Federal law; nevertheless, from long habit or fear, they are still almost automatically patronised. Of two particularly. notorious anti-Negro ex-Governors, Gene Talmadge, of Georgia, hasrecently died and Theodore Bilbo, of Tennessee, had to run the gauntlet of an inquiry after his election as Senator. How-

ever, Talmadge's son, Herman, on the same anti-Negro platform, has won the fight with the opposition candidate and his election to the governorship is now assured, while Bilbo still sits in the Senate. The fight will be long and bitter, but the sub--merged one-tenth of America's population cannot forever be held in bitter and contemptuous bondage.