Then he made a philosophical observation:
“If we had only the best class of white folks down here and the industrious Negroes, there wouldn’t be any trouble.”
The Jim Crow Car
One of the points in which I was especially interested was the “Jim Crow” regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of anything else connected with the Negro problem. The street car is an excellent place for observing the points of human contact between the races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both. In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on anything like a common footing. In their homes and in ordinary employment, they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were passed, forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.
While I was in Atlanta, the newspapers reported two significant new developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah Jim Crow ordinances have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at all. Montgomery, Ala., about the same time, went one step further and demanded, not separate seats in the same car, but entirely separate cars for whites and blacks. There could be no better visible evidence of the increasing separation of the races, and of the determination of the white man to make the Negro “keep his place,” than the evolution of the Jim Crow regulations.
I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door of each car, I found this sign:
WHITE PEOPLE WILL SEAT FROM FRONT OF CAR TOWARD
THE BACK AND COLORED PEOPLE FROM REAR TOWARD FRONT
Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind. As the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships, because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of friction and bitterness. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor—all conductors are white—ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: “Heh, you nigger, get back there,” which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward, proceeded hastily to do.
No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don’t know how many Negroes replied to my question: “What is the chief cause of friction down here?” with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.