RACIAL DISTURBANCES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26842, 5 August 1948, Page 5

RACIAL DISTURBANCES

NEGROES AND WHITES ATTACK EACH OTHER INCIDENTS IN LIVERPOOL N.Z.P.A.—Reuter—Copyright LONDON, Aug. 3. About 50 persons, mostly coloured, appeared in a Liverpool court on charges connected with what the police described as “ serious racial disturbances” in Liverpool in the past few days in which coloured men and white men attacked each other. Houses and property were damaged and a number of persons were injured. The police said that a gang of negroes, armed with bottles, swords, daggers, iron bars, coshes, and axes, attacked a group of white men who were walking peacefully along a street. The whites, “ hopelessly outnumbered,” ran away. The police tried to disperse the crowd which gathered, but the coloured men, from the windows of a negro club nearby, threw bottles and stones at them. The police forced an entrance to the club and found stacks of beer bottles against open windows ready as ammunition. One man had a loaded pistol which he turned on the police, but he was not able to fire it. The police prosecutor said that feeling was “ running high between coloured men and whites in Liverpool, and there was a grave danger of worse things happening if the men were granted bail.” The defendants were remanded for a week.