Following the Color Line Part 4

"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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 astonis.h.i.+ng. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 mola.s.ses and they were all talking while they warmed their s.h.i.+ns--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 Pa.s.sENGERS, 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 cla.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.tration in point not long afterward. Pa.s.sing 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 fas.h.i.+onable streets, occupied by wealthy white people, while white carriers were a.s.signed to beats in the mill districts and other parts of town inhabited by the poorer cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sed, 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 relations.h.i.+ps, 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 n.i.g.g.e.r, 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-cla.s.s fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta, "exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumes 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 pa.s.sengers, went inside and beat down a Negro with his bra.s.s 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 n.i.g.g.e.r, get out of that seat. What do you mean by sitting down with a white woman?"