A conservative black preacher has backed Newt Gringrich after the Republican presidential candidate came under fire for saying poor black children should work as janitors.

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who founded a Tea Party organization in South Central L.A, says that Gingrich was 100 per cent correct that blacks lack work ethic and that his own solution was to 'send them back to the plantation'. 

'One of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working,' Peterson told The Huffington Post's Black Voices.