Atlanta Daily World

African Woman Journalist On UN Slavery Probe Committee

By MARVIN L. WHITE
NEW YORK (ANP)—Sen. Jane Vialle, Negro woman journalist who represents one million Africans of Ubangi-Shari, French Equatorial Africa, in the council of the Republic upper house of the French Parliament, was one of the committee that heard the report on outright slavery in the United States at an UN hearing Thursday.

The report was made by the Workers Defense League of which Rowland Watts is secretary. A special committee of the UN which has been appointed to study slavery in all of its forms including forced labor, peonage and survivals of pure slavery include Prof. Poblete Troncoso of Chile, Bruno Lasker of the United States and C. W. W. Greenidge of the United Kingdom with Sen. Vialle.

Sen. Vialle was born in the Congo and educated in Paris. She has lived both in France and French Equatorial Africa. Before the war she was a staff writer of the Opera Mundi News agency. She joined the underground resistance movement in Marseilles in 1940, was arrested in 1943 when the Germans captured the city and spent the next year in a concentration camp and a prison.

In 1945 she entered politics making a good mileage speaking tour through Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ubangi-Shari and Chad. Her speeches on the educational and economic needs of the African people made such an impression she was elected to the Council of the Republic the next year as one of the two representatives from Ubangi-Shari. In 1948, she was reelected. The territory she and her colleague represent is larger than France itself and five times as large as New York State. Its population is a little over a million.

The report which the committee heard shifted the group's study of bondage as still practiced in the Middle East, Africa and South American countries to illegal peonage and forced labor in states like Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and California. The list of charges was entitled "Legal and Illegal forms of Forced Labor In the U. S."

It said that anti-peonage and anti-slavery laws of the United States had been resisted in some areas and their enforcement had been weak on some occasions. The Department of Justice cannot cope with these violations; it has only six lawyers on its staff of the civil rights section.

Mr. Watts cited several cases of workers who, he said, had decided they could not live on their wages and refused to report for work, only to be arrested and kept in jail until they paid fines and agreed to go back to work for their employers.