The Colour Bar

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 721, 8 May 1953, Page 10

The Colour Bar

A§ John Middleton Murry once remarked, man’s imagination in our century has to make a tremendous leap if civilisation is to survive. Though he was writing about peace, surely another leap in imaginative sympathy must also be made in regard to the colour bar. Few of us are without some prejudice here, a fact more noticeable when you really mix with a dark race. It was good, therefore, to hear from 3YC Wynford Vaughan Thomas’s _ stimulating BBC programme, The Colour Bar; good that he should want to do such a session and good that the BBC was liberal enough to use the work, more especially because it examined the situ-

ation, not in another country, but in the heart of Britain herself. The most telling case and the kind of situation around which the talk could have been organised was not that of the educated Negro protected by the enlightened policy of universities which brings pressure to bear on reluctant landladies, but that of the Liverpool fitter, torpedoed three times in the Empire’s cause, yet finding work difficult to get because of his colour. There is pathos, too, in the fact that Negroes "create" the problem because of their desire to come to the centre of an Empire to which they belong.