Word: black
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...must behave with greater circumspection than any governor before him. The gunfire of China's war was audible in the Portuguese colony. Through Porta do Cêrco, the massive, yellow brick border gate, poured panicky peasants and deserting Nationalist soldiers, clamoring for haven from the advancing Reds. Black sentries from Mozambique allowed them to pass, first stripping the deserters of weapons. By week's end, over Pak-sha-leang, a Chinese fort overlooking the single road into Macao, the gold-starred Red flag of Communist China waved ominously...
...South African government's official policy of apartheid-vaguely defined as "separateness" for 2,000,000 dominant whites and 8,000,000 subordinate blacks-reached an ultimate. In gold-mining Klerksdorp, at the request of the local Handelskamer (Chamber of Commerce), the town council agreed to provide separate hearses for the two races. It was unpleasant and unhealthy to contemplate, explained Councilman D. J. Piennar, that a hearse bearing a black corpse to the cemetery might next day be used to carry a white man's coffin...
South Africa's white men have decreed that South Africa's black men must carry official permits to travel, to work or be absent from work, to walk the streets after 9 p.m., to have their wives live with them in "locations" (suburban areas, usually overcrowded shantytowns, set aside for natives). Some 75,000 blacks go to jail each year because they are without proper passes. A hangover from slavery days, the pass system is a major grievance of the black majority against the ruling white minority...
Last week, in a location at Krugersdorp, a mining town 20 miles from Johannesburg, rumor spread that the pass system would be extended to black women. When a native speaker excitedly called for a strike, smoldering racial resentment burst into flame. Before dawn, picket lines armed with clubs gathered at the location gate, threatening to maul any black who went to work...
Thirty white policemen soon arrived to disperse the pickets. The blacks retaliated by stoning white auto drivers on a nearby road. Prancing and chanting old tribal war songs, thousands of black men swept toward the location superintendent's office, set fire to a few buildings. Rioting continued into the night. Police and strikers exchanged gunshots. Three were killed, many others wounded...