AMERICAN NEGROES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23011, 12 April 1938, Page 8

AMERICAN NEGROES

NO COLOUR PROBLEMCOTTON GROWER'S CLAIM V INACCURATE IMPRESSIONS [BY TELEGRArH —I'RF.SS ASSOCIATION'] ijV WELLINGTON, Monday "The only colour problem in the Southern States was when the negroes were tampered with by outside people, who came in to the south and meddled," said Mr. Dabnev H. Crump, of Memphis, Tennessee, who arrived yesterday by the Empress of Britain. Crump is an officer of the largest firm of cotton merchants in the United States. "In America them are some 10.000,000 negroes," add«ffl Mr. Crump; "There are verv many more coloured people in India than that. Prom what I have seen the main problems in India are not so much racial ones as those of famine and starvation in crowded districts. There is no such trouble in America." v Mr. Crump said that impressions of negro and European relations in the South were usually inaccurate, being coloured by comparatively infrequent cases of outrages by negroes and lynching* by whites. Much made of these cases in the press. The impression conveyed by "Uncle Tom's Cabin," perhaps the most widely read piece of anti-slavery propaganda ever written, was greatly exaggerated. Actually, before the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, cases of outrage by negroes were unheard of, while he believed some stories of ill treatment of the slaves were founded on only a small percentage of actual cases. "The negroes and the whites in the cotton country mostly dwell in amity," continued Mr. Crump. "On my par; ticular plantation there arc- about-25 white people, and 1000 negroes, and that is the usual proportion. The whites are the managers and the negroes the labourers, and there ii little friction."