FOOT LOOSE IN AMERICA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 79, Issue 7101, 31 August 1949, Page 9

FOOT LOOSE IN AMERICA

IMPRESSIONS OF NEW ZEALAND MINISTER THE RACIAL QUESTIONS “Foot-loose in America” was ths subject of an address given by the Rev. L. J. Boulton Smith at a meeting of the Canterbury Travel Club. Mr Boulton Smith returned to Christchurch recently from a nine months* visit to the United States.

“New Zealand is a very good’country to live in. We have here, in a smaller form, all that America has, and we do not have its extremes of poverty and wealth,” Mr Boulton Smith said. America was a flourishing and wealthy country, but he had seen there scenes of unutterable squalor.

Speaking on the racial question, Mr Boulton Smith said that the attitude in the far south was improving all the time, although he had found some southerners not worthy of the name, who looked down on the negroes. At a high school gaduation he had attended, all the students were negroes“They would have graced any school platform in New Zealand,” Mr Boulton Smitli said.

Deciding that he could not study sufficiently the lives of the people by being a tourist, Mr Boulton Smith said he decided to become a tramp. “I was turned from a tourist into an adventurer, in the right sense of the term, of course,” he said. In this way he was able to meet and talk with lumbermen, barmen, saloonkeepers, Communist students, millionaires, and many other persons whom he would not otherwise have met. In Atlanta he visited the home of Uncle Remus, the originator of Brer Rabbit. In Akron he saw the home of John Brown, immortalised in song. He saw towns which had had a population of as many as 6000 persons which had been submerged in the damming up of the waters iri the Tennessee Valley Authority project. He had been much impressed by the progress made in formerly backward areas in western Kentucky, Mr Boulton Smith said. In »one of»the small settlements in this area which he had visited 20 years ago it was said that every fourth man carried a gun. “The people lived in little- cabins. There w’as a vast deal of ignorance, and I would not have given 10 cents an acre for the land,” he said. When he revisited the area recently he found well cultivated farms, good roads, and the settlement had grown into a town. A three-storeyed church had taken the place of the small building where services had previously been held.