Atlanta Daily World

Equal Rights For Negroes

The American magazine for August, reporting the findings of a Poll of leading American experts, conducted by Arthur Kornhauser of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, counsels that the American people must do some hard thinking about the status of 13,000,000 Negroes in the months ahead if we are to maintain our prestige and popularity with the darker races of the world. "Our statesmen are apprehensive, too," declares the editor. They know that while we grapple with our race problem in America the eyes of the world will be upon us. Yellow-skinned Asiatics, brown-skinned Indians, Filipinos, Arabs, and Latin Americans, and dark-skinned Africans will be skeptical if we plead for democracy and equality abroad while race riots rage at home.

The Poll, representing a cross-section of leading experts in race relations, white and colored, discloses that the overwhelming majority believes that "the Negro should have a fair chance at any job he is qualified to fill; 99 per cent reject the false theory that Negroes are inferior to whites in natural ability, and that 93 per cent deny the assumption that race prejudice is inborn. Specifically the experts answers are classified as follows:

More than half predict that there will be still less discrimination and segregation than exists now for the Negro during the postwar years; two fifths take a dissenting view that when peace comes and Negro veterans go back to their old towns, there will be a rise in race hatred and the outbreaks of bloody riots, as there was after the last war, when the Ku Klux Klan sought to terrorize our dark-skinned citizens back into "their places." and that while the experts differ on what is in prospects, they are practically unanimous in agreeing on what would be best for the nation: "We must continue and increase our effort, to reduce discrimination and segregation," they state. And as a group, they are definitely opposed to holding the Negro to an inferior position-or even a separate, segregated one.

And seeking to place their fingers upon the sorest spots, the experts conclude by saying: "one of the greatest necessities is the removal of barriers to jobs. In many occupations Negroes are prevented from working at all, in others they are kept from rising to the extent of their natural abilities: they should have equal pay for equal work. they should have better housing: better chance for education; they must have the right to vote, for men and women deprived of this right to vote cannot protect their other rights."