White Supremacy At Home and Abroad

JR., GEORGE W. SHEPHERD

White Supremacy At Home and Abroad by GEORGE W. SHEPHERD, JR. When the tragedy at Little Rock, Arkansas, was thrown into the seas of racial passions that surrounds our world, tides of...

...This makes the task of winning just treatment infinitely greater for the African than for the American Negro...
...Many Africans soon wore out their shoes but walked on, on bare and blistered feet, five days a week, returning to their segregated hovels late at night with only time to drop with exhaustion for a few hours sleep before starting out again...
...This statement is true only within limits and if it leads to a sense of moral superiority, it is utterly false...
...The Negro no longer accepts his exploited second-class status...
...Brutal treatment was handed out by the police...
...Liberal Party members, like their counterparts in the American South, are weak and persecuted by their fellow whites...
...In America we believe that we face rough weather ahead but that on the whole we will find our way through the present storm to calmer seas...
...While the South Africans are guilty of a complacent head-in-the-sand attitude, we, too, have a great deal of this ostrich vulnerability...
...Educated and courageous, they are increasingly determined to lead their people out of bondage, to freedom...
...but there is no assurance they can do this if ruthless suppression continues...
...It is this new-found determination and self-respect of the Negro himself which is the great force for change and not the labors of good-hearted white liberals, although they have helped...
...In the weak and uncoordinated Administration approach lies the danger of situations in which federal troops will not prove to be such immediately pacifying agents...
...This was not a strike against the government or the racial system of apartheid in its initial phases...
...He is on the march in South Africa and in the American South...
...More than 14,000 were arrested...
...If they can keep to peaceful tactics of boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations, they will advance more rapidly...
...That is in the Union of South Africa, where two and a half million whites lord it over nine million Africans and Asians...
...Some were picked up on vagrancy charges for staying in the city without passes, others had the air let out of their bicycle tires, and some were turned out of automobiles for overloading...
...The world has seen nothing like it since the saintly figure of Gandhi led his people in a non-violent campaign against the brutalities of British colonialism more than a decade ago...
...and even though many leading Afrikaners have developed acute misgivings about the ethics of apartheid, the political leaders press ahead...
...It is painfully true that because the whites in South Africa are outnumbered four to one they are more desperate than whites in America who will, with the exception of a few places in the South, always be in a majority...
...The original campaigns in 1953 was called off after thousands had been arrested and judges began to impose long sentences of hard labor and flogging for such offenses as sitting on a bench marked "for whites only...
...Thus the two-thirds of the human race which is colored recoils at what they see here...
...At the height of the South African boycott, some 60,000 Africans in the suburbs of Johannesburg were walking about 18 miles a day to and from their work in the city...
...A growing consciousness of their strength when they act together is creating the confidence needed for the greater struggles that lie ahead...
...The colored man is not, indeed, waiting any longer for the white man to grant him equality...
...There were those in the Western world who condenmed "Gandhi's veiled violence" as there are well-meaning souls today who accuse Martin Luther King of arousing passions and Chief Luthuli of inviting reprisals against his people from the tough Afrikaner regime...
...But both King and Luthuli have correctly understood that their people are already on the move and that if they do not lead them others will, with perhaps more violent and extreme methods of resistance...
...The South African government declared that it would break the strike because it believed this to be a political demonstration more than a genuine economic grievance of the people...
...Men like Chief Albert Luthuli, the head of the South African National Congress, and Martin Luther King of Montgomery, Alabama, represent the emergence of the Negro people...
...The moral issue is simple: There can be no equality or brotherhood where there is separation, be it legal or spiritual...
...nor do they have a chief executive who, when pressed to the wall, is willing to send troops to protect the equal rights of citizens...
...Perhaps this will mean that the non-violent campaign against the color bar laws of the Union will be revived by the joint action committees of the non-white political movements...
...It was the white merchants, assisted by able church leaders like Bishop Reeves, who finally brought a settlement...
...Drawing inspiration from Christian conviction and Gandhian passive resistance, they have molded movements of their people to storm quietly and peacefully the barricades of the color bar...
...Like the successful boycott in Montgomery, it has already had an electric effect upon the wider non-white community...
...Unfortunately for the South African passive resisters, they have no Supreme Court and Bill of Rights to protect them against the use of totalitarian methods by the government...
...There is no equality before the law in South Africa...
...Most surprising was the warmhearted, sympathetic response of a part of the white community that realized for the first time the extreme poverty of these people...
...At the very foundation of American relations with the rest of the world resides the problem that regardless of all we have done to purge ourselves of the sin of racialism we are, in fact, still a country where white supremacy is practiced and where a colored skin is a badge of inferiority...
...A new class is arising...
...Unless a radical and unlikely change in the attitude of the majority of whites in the Union of South Africa develops, it is probable that considerable violence will ultimately shatter this unhappy country from one end to the other...
...Yet with tremendous courage they stand against threats and brickbats...
...But we Americans insist that it must be unraveled...
...The actual situation out of which the boycott arose was a 25 per cent fare increase, which the African people could not afford on their scant wages...
...This army of men and women protesting with their feet, shouting "Azikhwelwa" ("We shall not ride"), finally gained their point...
...Americans congratulate themselves on their progress in race relations by asserting that although things are pretty bad here, at least they are not so bad as in South Africa...
...Chief Lu-thuli's African National Congress stayed discreetly in the background of the boycott while giving it quiet encouragement...
...Here, as in the American South, there exists a system of official white supremacy...
...Currently steps are being taken to abolish inter-racial education in the universities and to curb the press...
...Thousands attempted to find temporary lodgings in the city proper, but they were hounded by the police, who threw them into jail for lacking permits for residence in the city...
...segregated eating, housing, education, and recreational facilities constrain the black man on every side...
...In a world where equality now must be emotionally embraced as the unifying bond between peoples, this isolation is the Gordian knot with which we are confounded...
...The American dilemma and that of the Union have a great deal in common, and both countries face an ominous future, possibly even disaster, if they do not courageously confront the full depths of their common moral problem...
...It is one of the modem miracles that, despite all that has happened from the slave trade to the present, Negro leaders can still have faith in the God the white man taught them to love...
...The Russians, like Alexander, have seized the sword and cut the knot...
...Yet in the light of the repercussions from Little Rock and all the intense emotional resistance in the South, are we not being rather naive in assuming that we will escape widespread disorder...
...As At Citizenship Boulevard in Montgomery, new friendships were formed and associations established between worlds that had never met...
...There is only one other country in the world where the sin of what Gandhi called "the white man's incurable pride" is practiced to the same extent as in America...
...Out of what were tribesmen and mine boys are coming the "black bourgeoisie"—doctors, lawyers, journalists, businessmen...
...But the accumulated resentment arising out of the intensification of the Nationalist government's apartheid policy, through the removal of Africans from areas within the city and the closing of church-supported schools, added fuel to the fires of passion that flared up over the fare increase...
...They are egged on by the white minority which increasingly fears the awakening of the African majority...
...The gravest danger for America is that we will not recognize the extent to which this inner corruption of a spiritual apartheid inevitably destroys the appeal of the American dream for two-thirds of the world...
...The group is independent of any direct reliance upon mining, share-cropping, and other systems of exploitation of cheap labor...
...The official policy of the government of South Africa, apartheid, is gradually being applied in an evergrowing series of laws...
...A much greater disaster than falling behind the Russians in missile development would be to fail to develop full equality before the law for all citizens here at home...
...The same forces that have created our revolution in the American South are creating the revolution in South Africa...
...but we have in common with South Africa a deep spiritual isolation between white and black...
...He is a member of the editorial board of Africa Today and is the author of "They Wait in Darkness," a study of current problems in Africa...
...Although the English segment (about 40 per cent of the white community) on the whole rejects apartheid in theory, while accepting racial discrimination as a necessity...
...Many whites stopped to give the strikers rides...
...There are, of course, vast differences between the situation in our South and in the Union of South Africa...
...When the tragedy at Little Rock, Arkansas, was thrown into the seas of racial passions that surrounds our world, tides of anti-American feeling were created abroad that will be washing our shores for years...
...The mass boycott of the buses in Johannesburg last spring, for 12 weeks, was inspired by the successful bus boycott program in Montgomery, Alabama...
...Will the colored world wait...
...One of the most hopeful forces working for justice and equality in both the American South and South Africa has been the Christian church...
...The latest acts removed the colored voters of Cape Province from the common voting rolls, struck at the heart of mission-supported education for Africans, and declared interracial worship illegal...
...There is also a Liberal Party that believes in racial unity in South Africa...
...he is instead inspired by a vision of a new earth that can be his by his own making...
...Belatedly, but nevertheless definitely, strong sections of the Christian church have rallied against the sinfulness of racialism...
...As in Montgomery, the spirit of the people, despite the hardships, won out...
...If we intend, as we must, to press ahead with integration in the deep South, seven devils may arise from this witches' cauldron...
...And in the long run Africans will gain the upper hand...
...himself in the paddy fields of Asia, the mines of South Africa, and in the new villages and industries of the South...
...He is no longer satisfied to wait for a heaven where "all God's children got shoes...
...All the glamour of Hollywood and our economy of abundance cannot erase the fact that here is a country where the ideal of "the great melting pot" has been a reality only for white Europeans...
...This was a remarkable victory for the African community that has suffered mostly defeats in its previous attempts at protest...
...With his rough hands, he is grasping it for GEORGE W. SHEPHERD, JR., who teaches at Brooklyn College, served formerly as director of the American Committee on Africa...
...For South African whites, democracy is unthinkable...
...The South Africans have more legal separation...
...Later, the government backed down completely and placed an assessment upon employers to continue the subsidy for the bus fare...
...The Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce agreed to make up the difference in the fare to the bus company...
...The real greatness of their movements is the spirit of forgiving love in which their rejection of discrimination in all its forms takes place...

Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2


 
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