“KU KLUX KLAN A DISGRACE”

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30862, 22 September 1965, Page 1

“KU KLUX KLAN A DISGRACE”

(New Zealand Press Association) LEVIN, September 21. “Members of the Ku Klux Klan are a disgrace to God, to the .United States and to the States from which they come,” said the Rev. George A. Hern, the Pastor of Dellwood Baptist Church, Memphis, Tennessee, in Levin Today.

“They are self-styled bigots. They have done things that are dreadfully wrong,” he said.

Mr Hern is a member of the Trans-Pacifie Crusade at present in New Zealand. “The K.K.K. is not making as much progress as it claims. The majority of white people In the South are against it.” he said.

“We have a tremendous problem, and we are doing our best to solve it,” Mr Hern said when speaking about integration in America. “But wc have made more progress in the last five years than we have in the last 60 to 70 years.” However, the problem was going to take time, patience

and understanding to solve, he said.

“In Memphis we have no Civil Rights problems—our leaders have gone overboard to put into effect Supreme Court laws giving equal rights to Negroes,” he said. “I don’t know of a single racial incident there.”

It was difficult for people who did not live in the South to understand the problem. The newspapers tended to play up somewhat some of the Civil Rights incidents, Mr Hern said. “This is an economic problem as well,” he said. “We have our measure of unemployment in America. The man who gets the job is the one that is qualified—and many coloured people are not qualified.”