“Be wise! Be discreet! Discuss this with no one! Fail not!
“THE COMMITTEE.”
There was a plain card enclosed, also of cheap and easily obtained quality, on which was typed a date, time, and place. …
Mirabile dictu, each of the fifteen recipients of this cryptic missive was a Ku Klux Klansman. …
CHAPTER XIX
Mrs. Tucker was operated on at Atlanta on Thursday morning at the Auburn Infirmary, owned and conducted by a group of coloured physicians of that city, as none of them could operate in the white hospitals. Kenneth keenly enjoyed being in a hospital again, with all its conveniences. The operation finished and Mrs. Tucker resting easily, he purchased, after much picking and choosing, Jane’s engagement ring—a beautiful, blue-white diamond solitaire.
That important task performed, he telephoned Dr. Scott, to whom Judge Stevenson had given him a letter of introduction. So engrossed had he been in the operation and the purchasing of the ring, he had almost forgotten the promise made to the judge to see and talk with Dr. Scott, known to be a liberal leader of Southern public opinion and one deeply concerned with the problem of race relations.
“That’s a mighty intelligent plan you’ve worked out,” Dr. Scott boomed over the wire. “I’d like to have you talk that over with me and one or two others here. Can you do it before going home?”
Kenneth told him he had to leave early next morning for Central City. As Dr. Scott had a meeting that would keep him engaged all afternoon, it was decided that they should meet that evening at an office in a building downtown in the business section.
It was with a deal of eagerness—and with some degree of anxiety, for he did not know how he would be received by Dr. Scott and the others—that Kenneth set forth that evening for the meeting. He found three men awaiting him in the office of John Anthony, who was one of the three. His footsteps echoed in ghostlike fashion as he walked down the hallway of the deserted building. From the open window there floated from the street below the subdued clatter of automobiles, the cries of newsboys, the restless shuffling of the leisurely crowd as it moved up and down Peachtree Street. Kenneth sought to weigh the three, who were, he felt, representatives of that “new South” of which so much was heard, but signs of whose activities he had so seldom seen. He was seeking to find out their motives, their plans of accomplishing that spirit of fair play toward the Negro, to determine how far they would go towards challenging the established order that was damning the South intellectually, morally, economically. Kenneth, with too-high ideals for his environment, was almost naïve in his eager search for the great champion he had dreamed of who would brave danger and contumely and even death itself for a newer and brighter day for his people in the South. That hope had been dulled somewhat by the things he had seen since his return to Central City, for he was not of an unreflective mind. Yet he had not seen far enough beneath the surface of that volcano of passion and hate and greed which is the South to realize that the South had never produced a martyr to any great moral cause one who had possessed sufficient courage to oppose, regardless of consequences, any one of the set, dogmatic beliefs of the South. True it was that there were some who had fought in the Civil War with firm belief that the South was right—even though it had been shown that their idealism was a perverted one. But even then these had moved with the tide of sectional sentiment and not against it.