Jackson Advocate

Truman's Civil Rights Spur S. African Negroes

Pretoria, South Africa (Atlas News Service)—South African Negroes are becoming very restive, and are no longer willing to accept serenely the dictates of a minority population who neither regards them as humans, or recognizes them as being capable of freedom. Today they are spurred on by President Truman's Civil Rights, already urged on by the late Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.

They know that the struggle for freedom is active in all the other parts of the world and men are touched by the inspiration of thinking for themselves, and wish to be regarded as men with the faculties of men.

The situation in South Africa has become a problem of international importance—such a problem that the Negro leaders have broken relations with the whites. No one can foresee the grave repercussions, or consequences of such a move. But one thing is certain, the woes of segregation in South Africa is no longer secret, and those Westerners who believed all was harmonious among the whites and blacks of this continent, may sink back into disillusionment.

Dissension between whites and blacks is not a new thing, and keen observers have long held that it was only a question of time when the two races would cease to live as a unit, when such drastic inequalities of status between the natives and whites were laws which relegated the blacks to nothing more than inhuman beings. Now that black men have arisen, groomed in the best tradition of Western culture, with a complete mastery of the English language, the situation becomes one of a struggle for freedom and equal rights.