Following the Color Line Part 5

Dr. Penn replied somewhat angrily:

"It's come to a pretty pa.s.s 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 n.i.g.g.e.r."

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-cla.s.s fare, he is provided with second-cla.s.s accommodations. Well-to-do Negroes who can afford to travel, also complain that they are not permitted to engage sleeping-car berths. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton usually takes a compartment where he is entirely cut off from the white pa.s.sengers. 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 a.s.signed 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 ma.s.ses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.serted 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]

"WHITES ONLY" "COLOURED ONLY"

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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.sing and that the Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent va.s.sal, 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 va.s.sal 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumes or demands any other relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociated 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_