Steady Progress Made In Race Relations

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31727, 10 July 1968, Page 2

Steady Progress Made In Race Relations

Progress made in improving race relations in the United States had been far more extensive than many people realised, a former civil rights worker said in Christchurch yesterday. She is Mrs Thurgood Marshall, wife of Mr Justice Thurgood Marshall, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Rights for Negroes had been achieved gradually and much of the credit must be given to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which had been fighting for the cause since 1908, she said. "The N.A.A.C.P. may not be as militant as some Negroes would like it to be, but by its

consistent work throughout tbe years in Congress and in the courts it has struck down many bias cases,” she said. Since the 19405, the legal arm of the association had been largely responsible for breaking down segregation in elementary and graduate schools, in railway waiting rooms and dining cars, and in hotels, motels and other accommodation. It had also been largely responsible for the removal of restrictive clauses on land sales, she said. Legal Burden The association had provided defence counsel for the late Rev. Martin Luther King’s non-violence protests, which had led to arrests, she said. It carried the legal burden of some other civil rights groups. Mrs Marshall, the former Cecelia Suyat,. was born in Hawaii of Filipino parents.

She went to New York to study court reporting at Columbia University in 1947, but became secretary to the director of branches for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. “This was my baptism to United States race relations," she said. “Coming from Hawaii I had not realised what this problem meant till then.” ' It became her mission in life, and through her work she met Mr Thurgood Mar- , shall, whom she married in 1 1955. Marriage meant the end of , her career as a civil rights | worker, although not the end of her interest. Her husband, known as “Mr Civil Rights,” continued his legal service in N.A.A.C.P. until he was appointed a United States Appeal Court judge by the late President Kennedy. He is now ■ visiting New Zealand as a Kennedy Fellow.

Mrs Marshall believes her home State of Hawaii is the best example of the democratic way of living. "There you have a meld of people of many nationalities —all Americans—living together in absolute racial harmony,” she said.