NEGROES IN AMERICA

Taranaki Daily News, 22 December 1934, Page 9

NEGROES IN AMERICA

NOT A SERIOUS PROBLEM LYNCHINGS COMPARATIVELY FEW. RESPECT OF AUTHORITY NEEDED. VIEWS OF AMERICAN VISITOR. Despite the grisly details of the lynchings of Negroes that from time to time filtered to New Zealand from the American Press services, the Negroes were not the problem in America that might be inferred from such incidents which, in any case, were not at all frequent. That was the opinion of Dr. A. L. Lewis, Hollywood, who was at Stratford yesterday in the course of a visit to Taranaki, when interviewed by the Daily News. Having been brought up in the southern States Dr. Lewis has first-hand knowledge of the Negro races and their mentality and has made a study of them. “The Negroes, though they form 10 per cent, of the total population of the States, are not a problem because most of them are in the southern States and the Southerners know how to get along with them the same as the Dutch control the native races in the Dutch East Indies,” Dr. Lewis said. “The blacks are reasonably well behaved. I do not think you would find there are more than half a dozen lynchings in a year. America is not the only country that comes down heavily on the erring ’ lack. I know for a positive fact that if the blacks kill one white man in New Guinea the whites will kill off about 100 blacks just to teach them a lesson. That is not generally known but it is a fact. White races that have to deal with blacks realise that the blacks must be kept in check and made to respect authority. Give a Negro an inch and he will take a yard every time.” PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT. When it became necessary to punish a Negro the psychological aspect had to be considered. Putting a white man in gaol injured his self-respect, placed a stigma on himself and his family and took away from him the liberty he prized. The blaclr, on the other hand, cared nothing for the abstract phases of imprisonment as punishment. The ignominy mattered nothing to him and while he was in gaol he was comfortable and well fed. “But,” Dr. Lewis said, “if you take him out in the woods, tie him to a tree and give him 25 or 3.0 lashes, as is done iri‘ parts of Alabama and Georgia when a. Negro commits a. serious offence, you give him something that makes him hesitate before he does wrong again.” Corporal punishment, he pointed out, was not by any means peculiar to America, and while he had been in New Zealand a man had been sentenced to flogging for a sexual offence. Flogging was simply a means of combatting crime and if it were used more often throughout the world he considered there would be much less crime.

It was a penitentiary offence in America for an Ethiopian, Mongolian or Malayan to marry a member of the Caucasian races, and that law, by checking intermarriage with coloured races, did much to prevent the coloured races from becoming a national problem. The Indians, however, were on a different footing. They were liked and respected in the same way that the Maoris were in New Zealand. Though they were on reservations many of them- were very wealthy and able to have all the amenities that the white man had. The Yokima Tribe in the State of Washington, it was estimated, was worth 25,000 dollars per capita while in Oklahama there were many Indians who were multi-mil-lionaires through owning land on which oil bores were sunk.

The Indians, however, had remained very clannish, and it was doubtful if more than 10,000 married outside the tribe. They confined themselves mostly to the reservations. They were generally indolent and rode bareback and wore the same clothes as: their forefathers did when America was being colonised by Europeans. • “They are in A class by themselves among native races in they have not adopted the white man’s customs—except his vices,” Dr. Lewis remarked.