FOLLOWING THE COLOR LINE

AN OLD BLACK “MAMMY” WITH WHITE CHILD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908

“I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.”

—De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” (1835)

PREFACE

My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life. I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present. Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view. The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.

I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity, as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems with failure or success.

I have accepted no statement of fact, however generally made, until I was fully persuaded from my own personal investigation that what I heard was really a fact and not a rumour.

Wherever I have ventured upon conclusions, I claim for them neither infallibility nor originality. They are offered frankly as my own latest and clearest thoughts upon the various subjects discussed. If any man can give me better evidence for the error of my conclusions than I have for the truth of them I am prepared to go with him, and gladly, as far as he can prove his way. And I have offered my conclusions, not in a spirit of controversy, nor in behalf of any party or section of the country, but in the hope that, by inspiring a broader outlook, they may lead, finally, to other conclusions more nearly approximating the truth than mine.

While these chapters were being published in the American Magazine (one chapter, that on lynching, in McClure’s Magazine) I received many hundreds of letters from all parts of the country. I acknowledge them gratefully. Many of them contained friendly criticisms, suggestions, and corrections, which I have profited by in the revision of the chapters for book publication. Especially have the letters from the South, describing local conditions and expressing local points of view, been valuable to me. I wish here, also, to thank the many men and women, South and North, white and coloured, who have given me personal assistance in my inquiries.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART ONE

THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH

CHAPTER I

A RACE RIOT, AND AFTER

Upon the ocean, of antagonism between the white and Negro races in this country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it. A description of that spectacular though superficial disturbance, the disaster incident to its fury, and the remarkable efforts at reconstruction will lead the way naturally—as human nature is best interpreted in moments of passion—to a clearer understanding, in future chapters, of the deep and complex race feeling which exists in this country.

On the twenty-second day of September, 1906, Atlanta had become a veritable social tinder-box. For months the relation of the races had been growing more strained. The entire South had been sharply annoyed by a shortage of labour accompanied by high wages and, paradoxically, by an increasing number of idle Negroes. In Atlanta the lower class—the “worthless Negro”—had been increasing in numbers: it showed itself too evidently among the swarming saloons, dives, and “clubs” which a complaisant city administration allowed to exist in the very heart of the city. Crime had increased to an alarming extent; an insufficient and ineffective police force seemed unable to cope with it. With a population of 115,000 Atlanta had over 17,000 arrests in 1905; in 1906 the number increased to 21,602. Atlanta had many more arrests than New Orleans with nearly three times the population and twice as many Negroes; and almost four times as many as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city nearly three times as large. Race feeling had been sharpened through a long and bitter political campaign, Negro disfranchisement being one of the chief issues under discussion. An inflammatory play called “The Clansman,” though forbidden by public sentiment in many Southern cities, had been given in Atlanta and other places with the effect of increasing the prejudice of both races. Certain newspapers in Atlanta, taking advantage of popular feeling, kept the race issue constantly agitated, emphasising Negro crimes with startling headlines. One newspaper even recommended the formation of organisations of citizens in imitation of the Ku Klux movement of reconstruction days. In the clamour of this growing agitation, the voice of the right-minded white people and industrious, self-respecting Negroes was almost unheard. A few ministers of both races saw the impending storm and sounded a warning—to no effect; and within the week before the riot the citizens, the city administration and the courts all woke up together. There were calls for mass-meetings, the police began to investigate the conditions of the low saloons and dives, the country constabulary was increased in numbers, the grand jury was called to meet in special session on Monday the 24th.

Prosperity and Lawlessness

But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities, too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900 to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was progressive—few cities I know of more so—but it had forgotten its public duties.

Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of them with whom I talked wished to protect any Negro who was really guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape, three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.

The facts of two of these cases I will narrate—and without excuse for the horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the South, these things must be told.

Story of One Negro’s Crime

One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He wore a soldier’s cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was worried—the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South—and when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told: his wife was under medical attendance in the house. She had been able to give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal’s tracks that he could not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for identification; when she saw him she said: “He is not the man.” The real criminal was never apprehended.

One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field; his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said, were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.

“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “You see, I’m a Christian man, or I try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We’ve talked about it. What good would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn’t we? No, let the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as much as I could. But many of them won’t work even when the wages are high: they won’t come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has come to me, and it’s just about ruined my life.”

When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the hill, asking: “Now, what would you do?”

One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence. He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little girl down, then her aunt. When the child “came to” she found herself partially bound with a rope. “Honey,” said the Negro, “I want you to come with me.” With remarkable presence of mind the child said: “I can’t, my leg is broken,” and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope, jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran off.

FAC-SIMILES OF CERTAIN ATLANTA NEWSPAPERS OF SEPTEMBER 22, 1906
Showing the sensational news headings

“When I got there,” said Mr. Lawrence, “my sister was lying against the bank, face down. The back of her head had been beaten bloody. The bridge of her nose was cut open, one eye had been gouged out of its socket. My daughter had three bad cuts on her head—thank God, nothing worse to either. But my sister, who was just beginning her life, will be totally blind in one eye, probably in both. Her life is ruined.”

About a month later, through the information of a Negro, the criminal was caught, identified by the Misses Lawrence, and sent to the penitentiary for forty years (two cases), the limit of punishment for attempted criminal assault.

In both of these cases arrests were made on the information of Negroes.

Terror of Both White and Coloured People

The effect of a few such crimes as these may be more easily imagined than described. They produced a feeling of alarm which no one who has not lived in such a community can in any wise appreciate. I was astonished in travelling in the South to discover how widely prevalent this dread has become. Many white women in Atlanta dare not leave their homes alone after dark; many white men carry arms to protect themselves and their families. And even these precautions do not always prevent attacks.

But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of the fear of the white people, but not much was said of the terror which the Negroes also felt. And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that fear. It is difficult here in the North for us to understand what such a condition means: a whole community namelessly afraid!

The better-class Negroes have two sources of fear: one of the criminals of their own race—such attacks are rarely given much space in the newspapers—and the other the fear of the white people. My very first impression of what this fear of the Negroes might be came, curiously enough, not from Negroes but from a fine white woman on whom I called shortly after going South. She told this story:

“I had a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago. I was walking along —— Street when I saw a rather good-looking young Negro come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help, and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment, then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came to. It shows, doesn’t it, how little it might take to bring punishment upon an innocent man!”

The next view I got was through the eyes of one of the able Negroes of the South, Bishop Gaines of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is now an old man, but of imposing presence. Of wide attainments, he has travelled in Europe, he owns much property, and rents houses to white tenants. He told me of services he had held some time before in south Georgia. Approaching the church one day through the trees, he suddenly encountered a white woman carrying water from a spring. She dropped her pail instantly, screamed, and ran up the path toward her house.

“If I had been some Negroes,” said Bishop Gaines, “I should have turned and fled in terror; the alarm would have been given, and it is not unlikely that I should have had a posse of white men with bloodhounds on my trail. If I had been caught what would my life have been worth? The woman would have identified me—and what could I have said? But I did not run. I stepped out in the path, held up one hand and said:

“‘Don’t worry, madam, I am Bishop Gaines, and I am holding services here in this church.’ So she stopped running and I apologised for having startled her.”

The Negro knows he has little chance to explain, if by accident or ignorance he insults a white woman or offends a white man. An educated Negro, one of the ablest of his race, telling me of how a friend of his who by merest chance had provoked a number of half-drunken white men, had been set upon and frightfully beaten, remarked: “It might have been me!”

Now, I am telling these things just as they look to the Negro; it is quite as important, as a problem in human nature, to know how the Negro feels and what he says, as it is to know how the white man feels.

How the Newspapers Fomented the Riot

On the afternoon of the riot the newspapers in flaming headlines chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out. And yet this was one of the “assaults” chronicled in letters five inches high in a newspaper extra.

And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white men and Negroes, both drinking—certain newspapers in Atlanta began to print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta News published five such extras, and newsboys cried them through the city:

“Third assault.”

“Fourth assault.”

The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, who in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and separated.

In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large; the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters Streets, with windows like arsenals, furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak. The good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of the city.

The Mob Gathers

And, finally, a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken horseplay, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black, Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing as an orderly mob.

Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face. A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man’s shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakably horrible manner. The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat them. Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming; they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not only Negro barber shops and restaurants, but they robbed stores kept by white men.

JAMES H. WALLACE	R. R. WRIGHT
“The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosenrepresentative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.”	Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe.
H. O. TANNER	REV. H. H. PROCTOR
One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize for the best American painting at Chicago.	Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many of the best coloured families of Atlanta.
Photograph by Sexton & Maxwell
DR. W. F. PENN	GEORGE W. CABLE
This prosperous Negro physician’s home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.	Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court, Indianapolis.

Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia—to apply that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.

It is highly significant of Southern conditions—which the North does not understand—that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta, when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or defending “his Negroes” in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith, Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual Negroes whom they know.

So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous—the atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again—in a suburb of Atlanta called Brownsville.

Story of the Mob’s Work in a Southern Negro Town

When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance, vice. And I was surprised to find a large settlement of Negroes practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful grounds, were two Negro colleges—Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes of the neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon. The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing the best reputation among white people who knew them.

Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta. All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. The Negroes of Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale. A condition of panic fear developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.

At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police, led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here, although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were not officers, joined them.

Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead; another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.

The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man’s wife, who saw the outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.

The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that they were expecting the mob; that the police—not mounted as usual, not armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens—looked to them in the darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.

The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later—and on this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead, but he has since recovered.

President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.

In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent, industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found—not shot, but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen—lying in a woodshed back of Fambro’s store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade, and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.

Results of the Riot

And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other way to defend those arrested, doctors’ bills were to be paid, the undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the Brownsville Negroes, said:

“We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police had been guilty of.”

After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get—I heard a good many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices—and left the country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because of the riot.

Report of a White Committee on the Riot

It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the riot was of the criminal class. Every one was industrious, respectable and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions:

1. Among the victims of the mob there was not a single vagrant.

2. They were earning wages in useful work up to the time of the riot.

3. They were supporting themselves and their families or dependent relatives.

4. Most of the dead left small children and widows, mothers or sisters with practically no means and very small earning capacity.

5. The wounded lost from one to eight weeks’ time, at 50 cents to $4 a day each.

6. About seventy persons were wounded, and among these there was an immense amount of suffering. In some cases it was prolonged and excruciating pain.

7. Many of the wounded are disfigured, and several are permanently disabled.

8. Most of them were in humble circumstances, but they were honest, industrious and law-abiding citizens and useful members of society.

9. These statements are true of both white and coloured.

10. Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty are coloured. Of the dead, two are white and ten are coloured; two female, and ten male. This includes three killed at Brownsville.

11. Wild rumours of a larger number killed have no foundation that we can discover. As the city was paying the funeral expenses of victims and relief was given their families, they had every motive to make known their loss. In one case relatives of a man killed in a broil made fruitless efforts to secure relief.

12. Two persons reported as victims of the riot had no connection with it. One, a Negro man, was killed in a broil over a crap game; and another, a Negro woman, was killed by her paramour. Both homicides occurred at some distance from the scene of the riot.

The men who made this brave report did not mince matters. They called murder, murder; and robbery, robbery. Read this:

13. As twelve persons were killed and seventy were murderously assaulted, and as, by all accounts, a number took part in each assault, it is clear that several hundred murderers or would-be murderers are at large in this community.

At first, after the riot, there was an inclination in some quarters to say:

“Well, at any rate, the riot cleared the atmosphere. The Negroes have had their lesson. There won’t be any more trouble soon.”

But read the sober conclusions in the Committee’s report. The riot did not prevent further crime.

14. Although less than three months have passed since the riot, events have already demonstrated that the slaughter of the innocent does not deter the criminal class from committing more crimes. Rapes and robbery have been committed in the city during that time.

15. The slaughter of the innocent does drive away good citizens. From one small neighbourhood twenty-five families have gone. A great many of them were buying homes on the instalment plan.

16. The crimes of the mob include robbery as well as murder. In a number of cases the property of innocent and unoffending people was taken. Furniture was destroyed, small shops were looted, windows were smashed, trunks were burst open, money was taken from the small hoard, and articles of value were appropriated. In the commission of these crimes the victims, both men and women, were treated with unspeakable brutality.

17. As a result of four days of lawlessness there are in this glad Christmas-time widows of both races mourning their husbands, and husbands of both races mourning for their wives; there are orphan children of both races who cry out in vain for faces they will see no more; there are grown men of both races disabled for life, and all this sorrow has come to people who are absolutely innocent of any wrong-doing.

In trying to find out exactly the point of view and the feeling of the Negroes—which is most important in any honest consideration of conditions—I was handed the following letter, written by a young coloured man, a former resident in Atlanta now a student in the North. He is writing frankly to a friend. It is valuable as showing a real point of view—the bitterness, the hopelessness, the distrust.

“... It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel, if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls, encourage by deed or word or both, a mob of ‘best’ and worst citizens to slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that caused God to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men ... of the mob! But I do not ... not quite, and I must hurry through the only life I shall live on earth, tortured by these experiences and these horrible impulses, with no hope of ever getting away from them. They are ever present, like the just God, the devil, and my conscience.

“If there were no such thing as Christianity we should be hopeless.”

Besides this effect on the Negroes the riot for a week or more practically paralysed the city of Atlanta. Factories were closed, railroad cars were left unloaded in the yards, the street-car system was crippled, and there was no cab-service (cab-drivers being Negroes), hundreds of servants deserted their places, the bank clearings slumped by hundreds of thousands of dollars, the state fair, then just opening, was a failure. It was, indeed, weeks before confidence was fully restored and the city returned to its normal condition.

Who Made Up the Mob?

One more point I wish to make before taking up the extraordinary reconstructive work which followed the riot. I have not spoken of the men who made up the mob. We know the dangerous Negro class—after all a very small proportion of the entire Negro population. There is a corresponding low class of whites quite as illiterate as the Negroes.

The poor white hates the Negro, and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in unclean streets, that the fire is generated. Decatur and Peters streets, with their swarming saloons and dives, furnish the point of contact. I talked with many people who saw the mobs at different times, and the universal testimony was that it was made up largely of boys and young men, and of the low criminal and semi-criminal class. The ignorant Negro and the uneducated white; there lies the trouble!

This idea that 115,000 people of Atlanta—respectable, law-abiding, good citizens, white and black—should be disgraced before the world by a few hundred criminals was what aroused the strong, honest citizenship of Atlanta to vigorous action.

The riot brought out all that was worst in human nature; the reconstruction brought out all that was best and finest.

Almost the first act of the authorities was to close every saloon in the city, afterward revoking all the licences—and for two weeks no liquor was sold in the city. The police, at first accused of not having done their best in dealing with the mob, arrested a good many white rioters, and Judge Broyles, to show that the authorities had no sympathy with such disturbers of the peace, sent every man brought before him, twenty-four in all, to the chain gang for the largest possible sentence, without the alternative of a fine. The grand jury met and boldly denounced the mob; its report said in part:

“That the sensationalism of the afternoon papers in the presentation of the criminal news to the public prior to the riots of Saturday night, especially in the case of the Atlanta News, deserves our severest condemnation.”

But the most important and far-reaching effect of the riot was in arousing the strong men of the city. It struck at the pride of those men of the South, it struck at their sense of law and order, it struck at their business interests. On Sunday following the first riot a number of prominent men gathered at the Piedmont Hotel, and had a brief discussion; but it was not until Tuesday afternoon, when the worst of the news from Brownsville had come in, that they gathered in the court-house with the serious intent of stopping the riot at all costs. Most of the prominent men of Atlanta were present. Sam D. Jones, president of the Chamber of Commerce, presided. One of the first speeches was made by Charles T. Hopkins, who had been the leading spirit in the meetings on Sunday and Monday. He expressed with eloquence the humiliation which Atlanta felt.

“Saturday evening at eight o’clock,” he said, “the credit of Atlanta was good for any number of millions of dollars in New York or Boston or any financial centre; to-day we couldn’t borrow fifty cents. The reputation we have been building up so arduously for years has been swept away in two short hours. Not by men who have made and make Atlanta, not by men who represent the character and strength of our city, but by hoodlums, understrappers and white criminals. Innocent Negro men have been struck down for no crime whatever, while peacefully enjoying the life and liberty guaranteed to every American citizen. The Negro race is a child race. We are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and we have now sunk to this level—we have shed the blood of our helpless wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly. He is here, and here to stay. He only knows how to do those things we teach him to do; it is our Christian duty to protect him. I for one, and I believe I voice the best sentiment of this city, am willing to lay down my life rather than to have the scenes of the last few days repeated.”

The Plea of a Negro Physician

In the midst of the meeting a coloured man arose rather doubtfully. He was, however, promptly recognized as Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost coloured physicians of Atlanta, a graduate of Yale College—a man of much influence among his people. He said that he had come to ask the protection of the white men of Atlanta. He said that on the day before a mob had come to his home; that ten white men, some of whose families he knew and had treated professionally, had been sent into his house to look for concealed arms; that his little girl had run to them, one after another, and begged them not to shoot her father; that his life and the lives of his family had afterward been threatened, so that he had had to leave his home; that he had been saved from a gathering mob by a white man in an automobile.

“What shall we do?” he asked the meeting—and those who heard his speech said that the silence was profound. “We have been disarmed: how shall we protect our lives and property? If living a sober, industrious, upright life, accumulating property and educating his children as best he knows how, is not the standard by which a coloured man can live and be protected in the South, what is to become of him? If the kind of life I have lived isn’t the kind you want, shall I leave and go North?

“When we aspire to be decent and industrious we are told that we are bad examples to other coloured men. Tell us what your standards are for coloured men. What are the requirements under which we may live and be protected? What shall we do?”

When he had finished, Colonel A. J. McBride, a real estate owner and a Confederate veteran, arose and said with much feeling that he knew Dr. Penn and that he was a good man, and that Atlanta meant to protect such men.

“If necessary,” said Colonel McBride, “I will go out and sit on his porch with a rifle.”

Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423 was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000.

But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such disturbances.

A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens of Atlanta:

Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L. Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner; Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house.

One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H. Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the Independent, a Negro journal, the Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop Holsey.

Committees of the Two Races Meet

This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of their differences.

They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, “What shall we do to relieve the irritation?” The Negroes said that they thought that coloured men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious. After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said:

“I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn’t know that there were such Negroes in Atlanta.”

Out of this beginning grew the Atlanta Civic League. Knowing that race prejudice was strong, Mr. Hopkins sent out 2,000 cards, inviting the most prominent men in the city to become members. To his surprise 1,500 immediately accepted, only two refused, and those anonymously; 500 men not formally invited were also taken as members. The league thus had the great body of the best citizens of Atlanta behind it. At the same time Mr. Proctor and his committee of Negroes had organised a Coloured Co-operative Civic League, which secured a membership of 1,500 of the best coloured men in the city. A small committee of Negroes met a small committee of the white league.

Fear was expressed that there would be another riotous outbreak during the Christmas holidays, and the league proceeded with vigour to prevent it. New policemen were put on, and the committee worked with Judge Broyles and Judge Roan in issuing statements warning the people against lawlessness. They secured an agreement among the newspapers not to publish sensational news; the sheriff agreed, if necessary, to swear in some of the best men in town as extra deputies; they asked that saloons be closed at four o’clock on Christmas Eve; and through the Negro committee, they brought influence to bear to keep all coloured people off the streets. When two county police got drunk at Brownsville and threatened Mrs. Fambro, the wife of one of the Negroes killed in the riot, a member of the committee, Mr. Seeley, publisher of the Georgian, informed the sheriff and sent his automobile to Brownsville, where the policemen were arrested and afterward discharged from the force. As a result, it was the quietest Christmas Atlanta had had in years.

But the most important of all the work done, because of the spectacular interest it aroused, was the defence of a Negro charged with an assault upon a white woman. It is an extraordinary and dramatic story.

Does a Riot Prevent Further Crime?

Although many people said that the riot would prevent any more Negro crime, several attacks on white women occurred within a few weeks afterward. On November 13th Mrs. J. D. Camp, living in the suburbs of Atlanta, was attacked in broad daylight in her home and brutally assaulted by a Negro, who afterward robbed the house and escaped. Though the crime was treated with great moderation by the newspapers, public feeling was intense. A Negro was arrested, charged with the crime. Mr. Hopkins and his associates believed that the best way to secure justice and prevent lynchings was to have a prompt trial. Accordingly, they held a conference with Judge Roan, as a result of which three lawyers in the city, Mr. Hopkins, L. Z. Rosser, and J. E. McClelland, were appointed to defend the accused Negro, serving without pay. A trial-jury, composed of twelve citizens, among the most prominent in Atlanta, was called—one of the ablest juries ever drawn in Georgia. There was a determination to have immediate and complete justice.

The Negro arrested, one Joe Glenn, had been completely identified by Mrs. Camp as her assailant. Although having no doubt of his guilt, the attorneys went at the case thoroughly. The first thing they did was to call in two members of the Negro committee, Mr. Davis and Mr. Carter. These men went to the jail and talked with Glenn, and afterward they all visited the scene of the crime. They found that Glenn, who was a man fifty years old with grandchildren, bore an excellent reputation. He rented a small farm about two miles from Mrs. Camp’s home and had some property; he was sober and industrious. After making a thorough examination and getting all the evidence they could, they came back to Atlanta, persuaded, in spite of the fact that the Negro had been positively identified by Mrs. Camp—which in these cases is usually considered conclusive—that Glenn was not guilty. It was a most dramatic trial; at first, when Mrs. Camp was placed on the stand she failed to identify Glenn; afterward, reversing herself she broke forth into a passionate denunciation of him. But after the evidence was all in, the jury retired, and reported two minutes later with a verdict “Not guilty.” Remarkably enough, just before the trial was over the police informed the court that another Negro, named Will Johnson, answering Mrs. Camp’s description, had been arrested, charged with the crime. He was subsequently identified by Mrs. Camp.

Without this energetic defence, an innocent, industrious Negro would certainly have been hanged—or if the mob had been ahead of the police, as it usually is, he would have been lynched.

But what of Glenn afterward?

When the jury left the box Mr. Hopkins turned to Glenn and said:

“Well, Joe, what do you think of the case?”

He replied: “Boss I ’spec’s they will hang me, for that lady said I was the man, but they won’t hang me, will they, ’fore I sees my wife and chilluns again?”

He was kept in the tower that night and the following day for protection against a possible lynching. Plans were made by his attorneys to send him secretly out of the city to the home of a farmer in Alabama, whom they could trust with the story. Glenn’s wife was brought to visit the jail and Glenn was told of the plans for his safety, and instructed to change his name and keep quiet until the feeling of the community could be ascertained.

A ticket was purchased by his attorneys, with a new suit of clothes, hat, and shoes. He was taken out of jail about midnight under a strong guard, and safely placed on the train. From that day to this he has never been heard of. He did not go to Alabama. The poor creature, with the instinct of a hunted animal, did not dare after all to trust the white men who had befriended him. He is a fugitive, away from his family, not daring, though innocent, to return to his home.

Other Reconstruction Movements

Another strong movement also sprung into existence. Its inspiration was religious. Ministers wrote a series of letters to the Atlanta Constitution. Clark Howell, its editor, responded with an editorial entitled “Shall We Blaze the Trail?” W. J. Northen, Ex-Governor of Georgia, and one of the most highly respected men in the state, took up the work, asking himself, as he says:

“What am I to do, who have to pray every night?”

He answered that question by calling a meeting at the Coloured Y. M. C. A. building, where some twenty white men met an equal number of Negroes, mostly preachers, and held a prayer meeting.

The South still looks to its ministers for leadership—and they really lead. The sermons of men like the Rev. John E. White, the Rev. C. B. Wilmer, the Rev. W. W. Landrum, who have spoken with power and ability against lawlessness and injustice to the Negro, have had a large influence in the reconstruction movement.

Ex-Governor Northen travelled through the state of Georgia, made a notable series of speeches, urged the establishment of law and order organisations, and met support wherever he went. He talked against mob-law and lynching in plain language. Here are some of the things he said:

“We shall never settle this until we give absolute justice to the Negro. We are not now doing justice to the Negro in Georgia.

“Get into contact with the best Negroes; there are plenty of good Negroes in Georgia. What we must do is to get the good white folks to leaven the bad white folks and the good Negroes to leaven the bad Negroes.”

“There must be no aristocracy of crime: a white fiend is as much to be dreaded as a black brute.”

These movements did not cover specifically, it will be observed, the enormously difficult problems of politics, and the political relationships of the races, nor the subject of Negro education, nor the most exasperating of all the provocatives—those problems which arise from human contact in street cars, railroad trains, and in life generally.

That they had to meet the greatest difficulties in their work is shown by such an editorial as the following, published December 12th by the Atlanta Evening News:

No law of God or man can hold back the vengeance of our white men upon such a criminal [the Negro who attacks a white woman]. If necessary, we will double and treble and quadruple the law of Moses, and hang off-hand the criminal, or failing to find that a remedy, we will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime, until the crime is no longer done or feared in all this Southern land that we inhabit and love.

On January 31, 1907, the newspaper which published this editorial went into the hands of a receiver—its failure being due largely to the strong public sentiment against its course before and during the riot.

After the excitement of the riot and the evil results which followed it began to disappear it was natural that the reconstruction movements should quiet down. Ex-Governor Northen continued his work for many months and is indeed, still continuing it: and there is no doubt that his campaigns have had a wide influence. The feeling that the saloons and dives of Atlanta were partly responsible for the riot was a powerful factor in the anti-saloon campaign which took place in 1907 and resulted in closing every saloon in the state of Georgia on January 1, 1908. And the riot and the revulsion which followed it will combine to make a recurrence of such a disturbance next to impossible.

CHAPTER II

FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE SOUTH

Before entering upon a discussion of the more serious aspects of the Negro question in the South, it may prove illuminating if I set down, briefly, some of the more superficial evidences of colour line distinctions in the South as they impress the investigator. The present chapter consists of a series of sketches from my note-books giving the earliest and freshest impressions of my studies in the South.

When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro, but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at all like it; no question which so touches every act of life, in which everyone, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in this one thing.

And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labour problem and the servant question; he is preëminently the political issue, and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler’s assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were naturally curious about what went on in the white man’s house. One day they asked him:

“What do they talk about when they’re eating?”

The boy thought a moment; then he said:

“Mostly they discusses us culled folks.”

What Negroes Talk About

The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of their conversation deals with the race question. I had been at the Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and said:

“I understand you’re down here to study the Negro problem.”

“Yes,” I said, a good deal surprised. “How did you know it?”

“Well, sir,” he replied, “we’ve got ways of knowing things.”

He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. “The South,” he said, “is getting to be too dangerous for coloured people.” His language and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.

“Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?” I asked.

“We don’t talk about much else,” he said. “It’s sort of life and death with us.”

Another curious thing happened not long afterward. I was lunching with several fine Southern men, and they talked, as usual, with the greatest freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I wondered if they were sensitive. Finally, I put the question to one of my friends:

“Oh,” he said, “we never mind them; they don’t care.”

One of the waiters instantly spoke up:

“No, don’t mind me; I’m only a block of wood.”

First Views of the Negroes

I set out from the hotel on the morning of my arrival to trace the colour line as it appears, outwardly, in the life of such a town.

Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western city. Sherman left it in ashes at the close of the war; the old buildings and narrow streets were swept away and a new city was built, which is now growing in a manner not short of astonishing. It has 115,000 to 125,000 inhabitants, about a third of whom are Negroes, living in more or less detached quarters in various parts of the city, and giving an individuality to the life interesting enough to the unfamiliar Northerner. A great many of them are always on the streets far better dressed and better-appearing than I had expected to see—having in mind, perhaps, the tattered country specimens of the penny postal cards. Crowds of Negroes were at work mending the pavement, for the Italian and Slav have not yet appeared in Atlanta, nor indeed to any extent anywhere in the South. I stopped to watch a group of them. A good deal of conversation was going on, here and there a Negro would laugh with great good humour, and several times I heard a snatch of a song: much jollier workers than our grim foreigners, but evidently not working so hard. A fire had been built to heat some of the tools, and a black circle of Negroes were gathered around it like flies around a drop of molasses and they were all talking while they warmed their shins—evidently having plenty of leisure.

As I continued down the street, I found that all the drivers of waggons and cabs were Negroes; I saw Negro newsboys, Negro porters, Negro barbers, and it being a bright day, many of them were in the street—on the sunny side.

I commented that evening to some Southern people I met, on the impression, almost of jollity, given by the Negro workers I had seen. One of the older ladies made what seemed to me a very significant remark.

“They don’t sing as they used to,” she said. “You should have known the old darkeys of the plantation. Every year, it seems to me, they have been losing more and more of their care-free good humour. I sometimes feel that I don’t know them any more. Since the riot they have grown so glum and serious that I’m free to say I’m scared of them!”

One of my early errands that morning led me into several of the great new office buildings, which bear testimony to the extraordinary progress of the city. And here I found one of the first evidences of the colour line for which I was looking. In both buildings, I found a separate elevator for coloured people. In one building, signs were placed reading:

FOR WHITES ONLY

In another I copied this sign:

THIS CAR FOR COLOURED PASSENGERS,
FREIGHT, EXPRESS AND PACKAGES

Curiously enough, as giving an interesting point of view, an intelligent Negro with whom I was talking a few days later asked me:

“Have you seen the elevator sign in the Century Building?”

I said I had.

“How would you like to be classed with ‘freight, express and packages’?”

I found that no Negro ever went into an elevator devoted to white people, but that white people often rode in cars set apart for coloured people. In some cases the car for Negroes is operated by a white man, and in other cases, all the elevators in a building are operated by coloured men. This is one of the curious points of industrial contact in the South which somewhat surprise the Northern visitor. In the North a white workman will often refuse to work with a Negro; in the South, while the social prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many kinds of employment.

I had an illustration in point not long afterward. Passing the post office, I saw several mail-carriers coming out, some white, some black, talking and laughing, with no evidence, at first, of the existence of any colour line. Interested to see what the real condition was, I went in and made inquiries. A most interesting and significant condition developed. I found that the postmaster, who is a wise man, sent Negro carriers up Peachtree and other fashionable streets, occupied by wealthy white people, while white carriers were assigned to beats in the mill districts and other parts of town inhabited by the poorer classes of white people.

“You see,” said my informant, “the Peachtree people know how to treat Negroes. They really prefer a Negro carrier to a white one; it’s natural for them to have a Negro doing such service. But if we sent Negro carriers down into the mill district they might get their heads knocked off.”

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.

Why the Negro Objects to the Jim Crow Car

Fundamentally, of course they object to any separation which gives them inferior accommodations. This point of view—and I am trying to set down every point of view, both coloured and white, exactly as I find it, is expressed in many ways.

“We pay first-class fare,” said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta, “exactly as the white man does, but we don’t get first-class service. I say it isn’t fair.”

In answer to this complaint, the white man says: “The Negro is inferior, he must be made to keep his place. Give him a chance and he assumes social equality, and that will lead to an effort at intermarriage and amalgamation of the races. The Anglo-Saxon will never stand for that.”

One of the first complaints made by the Negroes after the riot, was of rough and unfair treatment on the street cars.

The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me the same thing.

One result of the friction over the Jim Crow regulations is that many Negroes ride on the cars as little as possible. One prominent Negro I met said he never entered a car, and that he had many friends who pursued the same policy; he said that Negro street car excursions, familiar a few years ago, had entirely ceased. It is significant of the feeling that one of the features of the Atlanta riot was an attack on the street cars in which all Negroes were driven out of their seats. One Negro woman was pushed through an open window, and, after falling to the pavement, she was dragged by the leg across the sidewalk and thrown through a shop window. In another case when the mob stopped a car the motorman, instead of protecting his passengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his brass control-lever.

Story of an Encounter on a Street Car

I heard innumerable stories from both white people and Negroes of encounters in the street cars. Dr. W. F. Penn, one of the foremost Negro physicians of the city, himself partly white, a graduate of Yale College, told me of one occasion in which he entered a car and found there Mrs. Crogman, wife of the coloured president of Clark University. Mrs. Crogman is a mulatto so light of complexion as to be practically undistinguishable from white people. Dr. Penn, who knew her well, sat down beside her and began talking. A white man who occupied a seat in front with his wife turned and said:

“Here, you nigger, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down with a white woman?”

Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:

“It’s come to a pretty pass when a coloured man cannot sit with a woman of his own race in his own part of the car.”

The white man turned to his wife and said:

“Here, take these bundles. I’m going to thrash that nigger.”

In half a minute the car was in an uproar, the two men struggling. Fortunately the conductor and motorman were quickly at hand, and Dr. Penn slipped off the car.

Conditions on the railroad trains, while not resulting so often in personal encounters, are also the cause of constant irritation. When I came South, I took particular pains to observe the arrangement on the trains. In some cases Negroes are given entire cars at the front of the train, at other times they occupy the rear end of a combination coach and baggage car, which is used in the North as a smoking compartment. The complaint here is that, while the Negro is required to pay first-class fare, he is provided with second-class accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Washington usually takes a compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white passengers. Some other Negroes do the same thing, although they are often refused even this expensive privilege. Railroad officials with whom I talked, and it is important to hear what they say, said that it was not only a question of public opinion—which was absolutely opposed to any intermingling of the races in the cars—but that Negro travel in most places was small compared with white travel, that the ordinary Negro was unclean and careless, and that it was impractical to furnish them the same accommodations, even though it did come hard on a few educated Negroes. They said that when there was a delegation of Negroes, enough to fill an entire sleeping car, they could always get accommodations. All of which gives a glimpse of the enormous difficulties accompanying the separation of the races in the South.

Another interesting point significant of tendencies came early to my attention. They had recently finished at Atlanta one of the finest railroad stations in this country. The ordinary depot in the South has two waiting-rooms of about the same size, one for whites and one for Negroes. But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result: further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for whites, one for Negroes.

A leading coloured man said to me:

“No Negro goes to the lunch-room in the station who can help it. We don’t like the way we have been treated.”

A Negro Boycott

Of course this was an unusually intelligent coloured man, and he spoke for his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong enough to carry out such a boycott as this—and it is like the boycott of a labour union—actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes is a question upon which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more than one coloured leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along this very line:

“If once the Negroes got together and saved their money, they’d soon own the country, but they can’t do it, and they never will.”

After I had begun to trace the colour line I found evidences of it everywhere—literally in every department of life. In the theatres, Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places, many of them inexpressibly dilapidated and unclean. “Sleepers wanted” is a familiar sign in Atlanta, giving notice of places where for a few cents a Negro can find a bed or a mattress on the floor, often in a room where there are many other sleepers, sometimes both men and women in the same room crowded together in a manner both unsanitary and immoral. No good public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro in Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man.

COMPANION PICTURES

Showing how the colour line was drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.
Many of the saloons for Negroes were kept by foreigners, usually Jews.

In slavery time many Negroes attended white churches and Negro children were often taught by white women. Now, a Negro is never (or very rarely) seen in a white man’s church. Once since I have been in the South, I saw a very old Negro woman, some much-loved mammy, perhaps—sitting down in front near the pulpit, but that is the only exception to the rule that has come to my attention. Negroes are not wanted in white churches. Consequently the coloured people have some sixty churches of their own in Atlanta. Of course, the schools are separate, and have been ever since the Civil War.

In one of the parks of Atlanta I saw this sign:

NO NEGROES ALLOWED IN THIS PARK

Colour Line in the Public Library

A story significant of the growing separation of the races is told about the public library at Atlanta, which no Negro is permitted to enter. Carnegie gave the money for building it, and when the question came up as to the support of it by the city, the inevitable colour question arose. Leading Negroes asserted that their people should be allowed admittance, that they needed such an educational advantage even more than white people, and that they were to be taxed their share—even though it was small—for buying the books and maintaining the building. They did not win their point of course, but Mr. Carnegie proposed a solution of the difficulty by offering more money to build a Negro branch library, provided the city would give the land and provide for its support. The city said to the Negroes:

“You contribute the land and we will support the library.”

Influential Negroes at once arranged for buying and contributing a site for the library. Then the question of control arose. The Negroes thought that inasmuch as they gave the land and the building was to be used entirely for coloured people, they should have one or two members on the board of control. This the city officials, who had charge of the matter, would not hear of; result, the Negroes would not give the land, and the branch library has never been built.

Right in this connection: while I was in Atlanta, the Art School, which in the past has often used Negro models, decided to draw the colour line there, too, and no longer employ them.

Formerly Negroes and white men went to the same saloons, and drank at the same bars, as they do now, I am told, in some parts of the South. In a few instances, in Atlanta, there were Negro saloon-keepers, and many Negro bartenders. The first step toward separation was to divide the bar, the upper end for white men, the lower for Negroes. After the riot, by a new ordinance no saloon was permitted to serve both white and coloured men.

Consequently, going along Decatur Street, one sees the saloons designated by conspicuous signs:[1]

And when the Negro suffers the ordinary consequences of a prolonged visit to Decatur Street, and finds himself in the city prison, he is separated there, too, from the whites. And afterward in court, if he comes to trial, two Bibles are provided; he may take his oath on one; the other is for the white man. When he dies he is buried in a separate cemetery.

One curious and enlightening example of the infinite ramifications of the colour line was given me by Mr. Logan, secretary of the Atlanta Associated Charities, which is supported by voluntary contributions. One day, after the riot, a subscriber called Mr. Logan on the telephone and said: “Do you help Negroes in your society?”

“Why, yes, occasionally,” said Mr. Logan.

“What do you do that for?”

“A Negro gets hungry and cold like anybody else,” answered Mr. Logan.

“Well, you can strike my name from your subscription list. I won’t give any of my money to a society that helps Negroes.”

Psychology of the South

Now, this sounds rather brutal, but behind it lies the peculiar psychology of the South. This very man who refused to contribute to the associated charities, may have fed several Negroes from his kitchen and had a number of Negro pensioners who came to him regularly for help. It was simply amazing to me, considering the bitterness of racial feeling, to see how lavish many white families are in giving food, clothing, and money to individual Negroes whom they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white man’s kitchen. In some old families the “basket habit” of the Negroes is taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.

And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both know will never be paid back.

Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came to his office one day, and demanded—he did not ask, but demanded—a job.

“What’s your name?” asked the superintendent.

“Marion Luther Brittain,” was the reply.

“That sounds familiar,” said Mr. Brittain—it being, indeed, his own name.

“Yas, sah. Ah’m the son of yo’ ol’ mammy.”

In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.

The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old relationship finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man, indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an independent citizen, the white men—at least some white men—turn upon him with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis, as men; that, therefore, it encouraged “social equality,” and that, therefore, it was to be stopped.

Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact, where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in different street cars, and still live pretty comfortably. But the longer I remain in the South, the more clearly I come to understand how wide and deep, in other, less easily discernible ways, the chasm between the races is becoming.

The New Racial Consciousness Among Negroes

One of the natural and inevitable results of the effort of the white man to set the Negro off, as a race, by himself, is to awaken in him a new consciousness—a sort of racial consciousness. It drives the Negroes together for defence and offence. Many able Negroes, some largely of white blood, cut off from all opportunity of success in the greater life of the white man, become of necessity leaders of their own people. And one of their chief efforts consists in urging Negroes to work together and to stand together. In this they are only developing the instinct of defence against the white man which has always been latent in the race. This instinct exhibits itself in the way in which the mass of Negroes sometimes refuse to turn over a criminal of their colour to white justice; it is like the instinctive clannishness of the Highland Scotch or the peasant Irish. I don’t know how many Southern people have told me in different ways of how extremely difficult it is to get at the real feeling of a Negro, to make him tell what goes on in his clubs and churches or in his innumerable societies.

A Southern woman told me of a cook who had been in her service for nineteen years. The whole family really loved the old servant: her mistress made her a confidant, in the way of the old South, in the most intimate private and family matters, the daughters told her their love affairs; they all petted her and even submitted to many small tyrannies upon her part.

“But do you know,” said my hostess, “Susie never tells us a thing about her life or her friends, and we couldn’t, if we tried, make her tell what goes on in the society she belongs to.”

The Negro has long been defensively secretive. Slavery made him that. In the past, the instinct was passive and defensive; but with growing education and intelligent leadership it is rapidly becoming conscious, self-directive and offensive. And right there, it seems to me, lies the great cause of the increased strain in the South.

Let me illustrate. In the People’s Tabernacle in Atlanta, where thousands of Negroes meet every Sunday, I saw this sign in huge letters:

FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO AUBURN PHOTO
GALLERY OPERATED BY COLOURED MEN

The old-fashioned Negro preferred to go to the white man for everything; he didn’t trust his own people; the new Negro, with growing race consciousness, and feeling that the white man is against him, urges his friends to patronise Negro doctors and dentists, and to trade with Negro storekeepers. The extent to which this movement has gone was one of the most surprising things that I, as an unfamiliar Northerner, found in Atlanta. In other words, the struggle of the races is becoming more and more rapidly economic.

Story of a Negro Shoe-store

One day, walking in Broad Street, I passed a Negro shoe-store. I did not know that there was such a thing in the country. I went in to make inquiries. It was neat, well kept, and evidently prosperous. I found that it was owned by a stock company, organised and controlled wholly by Negroes; the manager was a brisk young mulatto named Harper, a graduate of Atlanta University. I found him dictating to a Negro girl stenographer. There were two reasons, he said, why the store had been opened; one was because the promoters thought it a good business opportunity, and the other was because many Negroes of the better class felt that they did not get fair treatment at white stores. At some places—not all, he said—when a Negro woman went to buy a pair of shoes, the clerk would hand them to her without offering to help her try them on; and a Negro was always kept waiting until all the white people in the store had been served. Since the new business was opened, he said, it had attracted much of the Negro trade; all the leaders advising their people to patronise him. I was much interested to find out how this young man looked upon the race question. His first answer struck me forcibly, for it was the universal and typical answer of the business man the world over whether white, yellow, or black:

“All I want,” he said, “is to be protected and let alone, so that I can build up this business.”

“What do you mean by protection?” I asked.

“Well, justice between the races. That doesn’t mean social equality. We have a society of our own, and that is all we want. If he can have justice in the courts, and fair protection, we can learn to compete with the white stores and get along all right.”

Such an enterprise as this indicates the new, economic separation between the races.

“Here is business,” says the Negro, “which I am going to do.”

Considering the fact that only a few years ago, the Negro did no business at all, and had no professional men, it is really surprising to a Northerner to see what progress he has made. One of the first lines he took up was—not unnaturally—the undertaking business. Some of the most prosperous Negroes in every Southern city are undertakers, doing work exclusively, of course, for coloured people. Other early enterprises, growing naturally out of a history of personal service, were barbering and tailoring. Atlanta has many small Negro tailor and clothes-cleaning shops.

Wealthiest Negro in Atlanta

The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta, A. F. Herndon, operates the largest barber shop in the city; he is the president of a Negro insurance company (of which there are four in the city) and he owns and rents some fifty dwelling houses. He is said to be worth $80,000, all made, of course, since slavery.

Another occupation developing naturally from the industrial training of slavery was the business of the building contractor. Several such Negroes, notably Alexander Hamilton, do a considerable business in Atlanta, and have made money. They are employed by white men, and they hire for their jobs both white and Negro workmen.

Small groceries and other stores are of later appearance; I saw at least a score of them in various parts of Atlanta. For the most part they are very small, many are exceedingly dirty and ill-kept; usually much poorer than corresponding places kept by foreigners, indiscriminately called “Dagoes” down here, who are in reality mostly Russian Jews and Greeks. But there are a few Negro grocery stores in Atlanta which are highly creditable. Other business enterprises include restaurants (for Negroes), printing establishments, two newspapers, and several drug-stores. In other words, the Negro is rapidly building up his own business enterprises, tending to make himself independent as a race.

The appearance of Negro drug-stores was the natural result of the increasing practice of Negro doctors and dentists. Time was when all Negroes preferred to go to white practitioners, but since educated coloured doctors became common, they have taken a very large part—practically all, I am told—of the practice in Atlanta. Several of them have had degrees from Northern universities, two from Yale; and one of them, at least, has some little practice among white people. The doctors are leaders among their people. Naturally they give prescriptions to be filled by druggists of their own race; hence the growth of the drug business among Negroes everywhere in the South. The first store to be established in Atlanta occupies an old wooden building in Auburn Avenue. It is operated by Moses Amos, a mulatto, and enjoys, I understand, a high degree of prosperity. I visited it. A post-office occupies one corner of the room; and it is a familiar gathering place for coloured men. Moses Amos told me his story, and I found it so interesting, and so significant of the way in which Negro business men have come up, that I am setting it down briefly here.

Rise of a Negro Druggist

“I never shall forget,” he said, “my first day in the drug business. It was in 1876. I remember I was with a crowd of boys in Peachtree Street, where Dr. Huss, a Southern white man, kept a drug-store. The old doctor was sitting out in front smoking his pipe. He called one little Negro after another, and finally chose me. He said:

“‘I want you to live with me, work in the store, and look after my horse.’

“He sent me to his house and told me to tell his wife to give me some breakfast, and I certainly delivered the first message correctly. His wife, who was a noble lady, not only fed me, but made me take a bath in a sure enough porcelain tub, the first I had ever seen. When I went back to the store, I was so regenerated that the doctor had to adjust his spectacles before he knew me. He said to me: