"Solly"

In South Africa's textile factories, white girls, most of them Afrikaners (of Dutch descent), work willingly alongside half-caste and Negro girls. The man mainly responsible for such amity is a 50-year-old Russian-born Jew named Emil Solomon Sachs. Secretary of the garment workers' union for 24 years and known to its 20,000 devoted members as "Solly," Labor Leader Sachs has helped raise their average weekly wage from $3 to $24 over the years.

His nonsegregation policy, however, incurred the bitter enmity of Dr. Daniel Malan's race-purity government. Last week the government branded him a Communist and ordered him dismissed from his trade-union job. The year-old Suppression of Communism Act empowers the government to remove from "public office" anyone the Minister of Justice decides is, or ever has been, a Communist.

Sachs made a trip home to Russia in 1921 and came back a Communist, but he was publicly expelled by the party in 1931. The creed he now proclaims is "South Africa needs not Lenin, but Lincoln." Only last year, South Africa's supreme court ruled that he is not a Communist. To many, including influential conservative newspapers, the Malan government seemed less concerned with Sachs's being a Communist than with getting control of his and other trade unions, then forcing them to follow the Nationalist Party's apartheid (segregation) line.

By formal order last week, the government forbade Sachs to hold any public meetings. His reply was to summon his unionists to a fiery protest meeting outside the Johannesburg City Hall. Twelve thousand turned up, bearing banners: "Solly helped us, now let us help him." According to the police, they also brought a car loaded with empty bottles. Soon after Sachs began to speak, police charged forward, armed with revolvers and truncheons. While screaming women battered them with sticks, bottles, and legs torn off tables and chairs, the police dragged Sachs inside the City Hall, barricaded the main door, and then hustled their captive through a side door into a waiting patrol wagon. No shots were fired, but 51 women and 15 policemen were injured.

The Trades and Labor Council, with a total membership of 90,000, declared: "This is the first crack of the Nazi whip." In Cape Town, Opposition Leader Jacob Strauss, as stout an anti-Communist as Dr. Malan, promised that his United Party would stand by the trade unions.

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