Ray Stannard Baker

“ The old-fashioned darkey 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 patronize 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. ”

“ 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. I have seen, so far, no better place than the street car 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. ”

“ In the theaters, Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of course, white hotels and restaurants are entirety barred to Negroes, with the result that colored people have their own eating and sleeping places, most 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. ”

“ They did come into contact with the servant Negro, the field hand, the common laborer, 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. ”

“ 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 colored 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, though having no especial prejudice against the Negro, will often refuse to work with him; in the South, while the social prejudice is strong, Negroes and whites work together side by side in many kinds of employment. ”

“ 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. Finally, after the riot, all Negro saloon-keepers were thrown out of business, and by the new requirement no saloon can serve both white and colored men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The admit "made-over dishes" of economical New England are here absent, because nothing is ever left to make over. The Negro eats it up! Even bread here is not usually baked days ahead as in the North, but made fresh for every meal—the famous, delicious (and indigestible) "hot bread" of the South. 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 ”

“ Public attention had been peculiarly riveted upon the facts of race relationships not only in Atlanta but throughout the South, and all manner of remedies and solutions were under sharp discussion. If I had traveled the country over, I could not have found a more favorable time or place to begin following the color line.
I had naturally 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 ”

“ 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, as I showed last month, was of rough and unfair treatment on the street cars. ”

“ 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 m 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. ”

“ Many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful, simple, ignorant, obedient, cheerful, old plantation darkey and deplore his disappearance. They want the New South, but the old darkey. That darkey 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 mv clever friend says, doesn't laugh as much as the old one. It is grim business he in ”

“ No good public accommodations exist for the educated or well-to-do Negro. Indeed, one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with the extreme difficulties which beset the exceptional colored man. ”

“ 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 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." ”

“ 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 while 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 patronize him. I was much interested to find out how this young man
The first drug store in Atlanta operated by a colored man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact, where, of course, the repulsion Is intense. They are the outward evidences of separation, but while highly provocative, they are not really of vital importance. Negroes and whites can go to different schools, churches and saloons, and sit in different street cars, and still live pretty comfortably. ”