The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-09-22
and report on thet reatment Of our negro soldiers Is in order.
 Yours very cordially,
 JOHN 0. WALKER.
Chairman, Inter Racial Committee
Opportunity" Comments

Opportunity" Comments
 The following article appeared under the caption "The Editor Says In Opportunity" c journal devot- ed to Negro life.
 The inherent inconsistency in the segregation of Negro soldiers would be ludicrous if its impllca- tions were not so startlingly tragic. For what the army hier. archy is attempting to do is to train thousands of Negroes to hate and kill one group of white men, Germans presumably, or perhaps Frenchmen, or both, but in the process to endure oStra. cism, Insult, sneers, Jim Crow ism and persecution without 1e- sentiment from another group of white men who are supposed to be either their comrades in arms or citizens of the country they are being trained to defend.
 It won't work. And the trouble which recently broke out at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which Negro soldier and @ white soldier were killed, and scores of inno- cent Negro soldiers were merci- leSsly beaten; and the wholesale exodus of Negro soldiers from their command in Arkansas, where they were driven from the highway by white hoodlums; and the unrestrained attacks which white military police launched against Negroes in Wilmington, North Carolina, are but the prelude to serious conflict if the War Department continues to In. sist that Negro soldiers be segre. gated and trained in the South, or Is unwilling to afford to them protection in the exercise of their Fundamental civil rights.
 The tragedy of segregation is that 1t must inevitably breed con- tempt. And the white military poe lice feel called upon to enforce the customs of the South on Ne. groeS by bullying them, beating them, and If resisted, finally kill- ing them. Negro boys born and reared in northern environments, who have freely associated with white youth, unaccustomed to the humiliating racial restrictions of the South, resent treatment which marks them as pariahs unfit to drink at the same water foun- tains, ride in the same buses and street cars, attend the same mo- tion pictures as other soldiers of every conceivable nationality and as citizens of a common country.
 Goaded to bitter desperation by the successive beatingS of Negro soldiers by white civilian police in Houston, Texas, in August, 1917, a group of Negro enlisted men from the 24th Infantry coun- ter attacked and killed sixteen or more white civilians which led to the court martial, conviction and hanging of eighteen members of that regiment.
 Does the War Department want that occurrence repeated?
 Is the lesson of that grotesque bungling by the military author itieS wholly lost?
 Does the War Department ex- pect the Negro soldiers who are being trained to kill Germans, or perhaps Japanese, to endure being showed around and insulted by Americans without retaliation? If it does, some bright morning It $ due for a sanguinary surprise.
 Negro soldiers are Americans. They don't like being showed around.
 The Newspaper PM has revealed that army officers in the North are deliberately inoculating porth- ern white youth with the virus of racial hatred. The August 7th is- sue of that distinguished daily prints a letter from a white sol- dier in which he quotes the .fl- structions given by an officer 10 the soldiers at Camp Upton, New York, who were about to be sent South.
 He warned them not to drink with niggers because if you get in- to trouble whlle with enc of them, it's you men who are going to be locked up, not the nlgger.
 Don't shake . nigsers hand when he says goodbye"
 This is in keeping with the confidential memorandum issued on unimpeachable authority at the instance Of the American General staff to the French 0en- eraI staff in lole ln which French soldlegs were advised 10 refrain from ffaterniHng with Negro