U.S.A. COLOUR PROBLEM.

Waipa Post, Volume XX, Issue 1179, 8 December 1921, Page 7

U.S.A. COLOUR PROBLEM.

TULSA RACE RIOTS. A NATIONAL DISGRACE. “ There is one problem in American 'life for which I foresee no solutin. It is the race problem—the negro

question.” These words of Grover Cleveland are recalled 'by the Louisville CourierJournal in its editorial discussion on the sudden and appalling flare-up of mob fury and race hatred in Tulsa. In this Oklahoma city, which, according to one of its journals, “has the highest per capita wealth of any city in the world,” the rumour that a coloured boy was to be lynched brought a crowd of armed negroes to the gaol to prevent it. With the white mob and the black confronting one another somebody fired a shot, and the result was a pitched battle, with scores of casualties, and burning of the city’s negro section, and the addition of “ a ghastly chapter to the record of a national disgrace.” For while the immediate cause of the Tulsa tragedy has been concisely described hs “an impudent negro, an hysterical girl, and a yellow journal reporter,” the conditions which provided the tinder for this spark are not peculiar to Tulsa or Oklahoma, but exist in varying degree, we are told, in all parts of the country where the negro is numerous enough to be a problem. According to the editor of a New York negro weekly, race war lies latent in many American cities, and’ * as for New York city, it is a magazine. I All it needs is to have a fuse touched off.” The causes behind the Tulsa explosion and similar outbreaks of the last few years, editorial observers tell us, are the lynch law spirit, peonage, race prejudice, economic rivalry between blacks and whites, radical propaganda, unemployment, corrupt politics, and the new negro spirit of self-assertion. Among the remedies proposed are new legislation, strict and impartial law enforcement, unionisation of the negroes, and the Golden Rule. >