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:

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:

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:

“‘You can wash bottles, put up castor oil, salts and turpentine, sell anything you know and put the money in the drawer.’

“He showed me how to work the keys of the cash drawer. ‘I am going to trust you,’ he said. ‘Don’t steal from me; if you want anything ask for it, and you can have it. And don’t lie; I hate a liar. A boy who will lie will steal, too.’

“I remained with Dr. Huss thirteen years. He sent me to school and paid my tuition out of his own pocket; he trusted me fully, often leaving me in charge of his business for weeks at a time. When he died I formed a partnership with Dr. Butler, Dr. Slater, and others, and bought the store. Our business grew and prospered, so that within a few years we had a stock worth $3,000, and cash of $800. That made us ambitious. We bought land, built a new store, and went into debt to do it. We didn’t know much about business—that’s the Negro’s chief trouble—and we lost trade by changing our location, so that in spite of all we could do, we failed and lost everything, though we finally paid our creditors every cent. After many trials we started again in 1896 in our present store; to-day we are doing a good business; we can get all the credit we want from wholesale houses, we employ six clerks, and pay good interest on the capital invested.”

Greatest Difficulties Met by Negro Business Men

I asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had to meet. He said it was the credit system; the fact that many Negroes have not learned financial responsibility. Once, he said, he nearly stopped business on this account.

“I remember,” he said, “the last time we got into trouble. We needed $400 to pay our bills. I picked out some of our best customers and gave them a heart-to-heart talk and told them what trouble we were in. They all promised to pay; but on the day set for payment, out of $1,680 which they owed us we collected just $8.25. After that experience we came down to a cash basis. We trust no one, and since then we have been doing well.”

He said he thought the best opportunity for Negro development was in the South where he had his whole race behind him. He said he had once been tempted to go North looking for an opening.

“How did you make out?” I asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “when I got there I wanted a shave; I walked the streets two hours visiting barber shops, and they all turned me away with some excuse. I finally had to buy a razor and shave myself! That was just a sample. I came home disgusted and decided to fight it out down here where I understood conditions.”

Of course only a comparatively few Negroes are able to get ahead in business. They must depend almost exclusively on the trade of their own race, and they must meet the highly organised competition of white men. But it is certainly significant that even a few are able to make progress along these unfamiliar lines. Many Southern men I met had little or no idea of the remarkable extent of this advancement among the better class of Negroes. Here is a strange thing. I don’t know how many Southern men have prefaced their talks with me with words something like this:

“You can’t expect to know the Negro after a short visit. You must live down here like we do. Now, I know the Negroes like a book. I was brought up with them. I know what they’ll do and what they won’t do. I have had Negroes in my house all my life.”

But curiously enough I found that these men rarely knew anything about the better class of Negroes—those who were in business, or in independent occupations, those who owned their own homes. They did come into contact with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common labourer, who make up, of course, the great mass of the race. On the other hand, the best class of Negroes did not know the higher class of white people, and based their suspicion and hatred upon the acts of the poorer sort of whites with whom they naturally came into contact. The best elements of the two races are as far apart as though they lived in different continents; and that is one of the chief causes of the growing danger of the Southern situation. It is a striking fact that one of the first—almost instinctive—efforts at reconstruction after the Atlanta riot was to bring the best elements of both races together, so that they might, by becoming acquainted and gaining confidence in each other, allay suspicion and bring influence to bear upon the lawless elements of both white people and coloured.

Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant, obedient, cheerful, old plantation Negro and deplore his disappearance. They want the New South, but the old Negro. That Negro is disappearing forever along with the old feudalism and the old-time exclusively agricultural life.

A new Negro is not less inevitable than a new white man and a new South. And the new Negro, as my clever friend says, doesn’t laugh as much as the old one. It is grim business he is in, this being free, this new, fierce struggle in the open competitive field for the daily loaf. Many go down to vagrancy and crime in that struggle; a few will rise. The more rapid the progress (with the trained white man setting the pace), the more frightful the mortality.

CHAPTER III

It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning carried over one hundred names—men, women, and children, white and black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]

A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes, with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194 Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice, dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.

“Where’s your home?” the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the answer was:

“Ah come here fum de country.”

Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature, nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life. But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge Broyles’s court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the “poor whites” who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.

Negro Cocaine Victims

Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or morphine poisoning—the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.

INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN’S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN INDIANAPOLIS

“What’s the trouble here?” asked the judge.

“Coke,” said the officer.

“Ten-seventy-five,” said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.

They buy the “coke” in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.

So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant and weak—and then wonders why crime is prevalent!

One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.

“What’s the trouble here?” inquires the judge.

The white complainant—a boy—says:

“This nigger insulted me!” and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.

“Did you call him that?”

“No sah, I never called him no such name.”

“Three-seventy-five—you mustn’t insult white people.”

And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the Georgian:

Story of a Negro Arrest

The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably dressed. Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going home from work at nine o’clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the officers were “jes’ plain white men” who were going to attack him. When he started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:

“You mustn’t attack officers,” and bound him over to trial in the higher court.

A White Man and a Negro Woman

Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable—so much so, indeed, that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge’s desk, the old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression, tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.

“What’s the charge?” asked the judge.

“Adultery,” said the officer.

The woman winced, the old man did not look up.

The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.

“Why don’t you get married?” he asked.

“The woman,” said the officer, “is a nigger.”

She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the experienced eye of the judge.

“Is that so?” asked the judge.

The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls—and a very bright, ambitious girl—as I learned later, was a student in Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had complained and the man and woman were arrested.

“Is this all true?” asked the judge.

Neither said a word.

“You can’t marry under the Georgia law,” said the judge; “I’ll have to bind you over for trial in the county court.”

They were led back to the prisoners’ rooms. A few minutes later the bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:

“The old man has fallen in a faint.”

Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court room.

One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example, was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer—North and South—is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs, but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the leader of the League, said to me: “We complain that the Negroes will not help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give him that, above all things.”

In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr. Underwood, to appear regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.

Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia

One reason for the very large number of arrests—in Georgia particularly—lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.

Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency is to convict as many men as possible—it furnishes steady, cheap labour to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.

Fate of the Black Boy

As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly in visiting Judge Broyles’s court—and others like it—was the astonishing number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years were arrested and brought into court—in other words, 578 boys and girls, mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!

“I should think,” I said to a police officer, “you would have trouble in taking care of all these children in your reformatories.”

“Reformatories!” he said, “there aren’t any.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Well, if they’re bad we put ’em in the stockade or the chain-gang, otherwise they’re turned loose.”

I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being opened at Milledgeville—which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr. Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen, arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the probation system.

Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each, and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.

Care of Negro Orphans

With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another, adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken children sent by the city charities department. After the riot the appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.

Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta every day—shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for life—where they make a profit for the state!

Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility, in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.

Why Negro Children Are Not in School

My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent. Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are often neglected, so in the South the lowest class—which is the Negro—is neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.

Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to this fact, and says also:

The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education. One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!

How Negroes Educate Themselves

Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up who come in from the neighbourhood. This “college,” in reality a grammar school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this “college” there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women and supported wholly by the tuition paid—the Negroes thus voluntarily taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter. Coloured children began to pour out of the house. “What’s this?” I said, and I turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and inconvenient—but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue’s school, perhaps the best known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.

Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of the city—Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary, which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by Northern philanthropy.

Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school board (1903), from which these facts appear:

Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are nevertheless being educated—on the streets, and for criminal lives.

White Instruction for Black Children

I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either morally, industrially or intellectually—and I was astonished to find that it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:

“The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship.”

A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of the teachers said to me:

“You don’t know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except those who have some necessary business with the institution.”

Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might be created.

Apologising for Helping Negroes

Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter published in the Orangeburg, S. C., News, signed by a well-to-do white citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school: