IN VIRGINIA

By the abolition of slavery mankind threw off a great evil. The slave owner escaped as well as the slave. For, although our human sympathy goes more readily to the slaves themselves, it is nevertheless true that it was as bad for the spirit and character of the owners as for those of their chattels. To-day in America, and especially in the South, there is a hereditary taint in the mind derived from slavery and it is to be observed in the descendants of the masters as much as in the descendants of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this American problem as exclusively a Negro problem. It is as necessary to study the white people as the black. The children of the owners and the overseers and the slave drivers are not the same as the children of families where no slaves were ever owned. Mastery of men and power over men have been bred in their blood. That in part explains the character of that section of the United States where slaves were most owned, and the brutality, cruelty, and sensuality which upon occasion disfigure the face of society in 1920. The old dead self leers out with strange visage from the new self, which wishes to be different.

If you see a white man in New Orleans rolling his quid and spitting out foul brutality against “niggers,” you will often find that his father was a driver on a plantation. Or if in that abnormal way so characteristic of the South you hear foul sexual talk about the Negroes rolling forth from a lowbrow in Vicksburg, it is fairly likely that he is full of strange black lust himself, and that his father and grandfather perchance assaulted promiscuously Negro women and contributed to the writing of racial shame in the vast bastardy of the South. If you hear a man urging that the Negro is not a human being, but an animal, you will often find that he himself is nearer to the animal. His fathers before him held that the Negroes were animals and not humans. And, believing them animals, they yet sinned with the animals, and so brought themselves down to animal level. You see a crowd of white men near Savannah. They are mostly proud of their English origin. Yet they are going to burn a Negro alive for killing a sheriff. How is it possible in this century? It is possible because it is in the blood of the children. They crave to see Uncle Tom’s flesh crackling in the flames and hear his hysterical howls. Their fathers did. Their children’s children will do the same unless it is stamped out by the will of society as a whole.

Of course the inheritance of evil is not the same in all classes of society. Everyone inherits something from the baleful institution, but not everyone the same. The mind of the coarse White is crude and terrible, and the mind of the refined is certainly different. One should perhaps be more lenient to the poor, and more urgent in criticism of the rich. For all stand together, and the disease is one not merely of individuals, but of the whole. The rich and cultured condone the brutality of the masses because they have a point of view which is incompatible with theirs.

Those whose ancestors treated the slaves well, claim to be immune from all criticism. There were in the old days many kind and considerate masters to whom the Negroes were wonderfully attached. But even these masters suffered from the institution of slavery, as any rich man suffers from dependence on retainers and flunkeys and servants whom he practically owns, as all suffer who are divorced from the reality of earning their living as equals with their neighbors. And their children, brought up amidst the submissive servility of the Negroes, grew to be little monarchs or chiefs, and always to expect other people to do things for them. Where ordinary white children learn to ask and say “please,” they learned to order and command and to threaten with punishment. The firm lip of the educated Southerner has an expression which is entirely military. In the army, one asks for nothing of inferiors except courage on the day of battle. All is ordered. And the power to order and to be obeyed rapidly changes the expression of the features. It has changed the physiognomy of the aristocracy in the Southern section of the United States. You can classify all faces into those who say “please” and those who do not, and the children of the slave owners are mostly in the second category. Unqualified mastership; indifference to dirt and misery in the servant class; callous disregard of others’ pain, or pleasure taken in their pain; slaves said to be animals and not human beings, and the superadded sin of bestiality, using a lower caste to satiate coarse lusts which the upper caste could not satisfy; the buying and selling of creatures who could otherwise only belong to God—all these terrible sins or sinful conditions are visited on the third and fourth generation of those who hate, though as must always be said, God’s mercy is shown to thousands of them that love Him and keep His eternal commandments.

The children of the slaves also inherit evil from their slavery. The worst of these are resentment and a desire for revenge. Doubtless, slavery sensualized the Negro. He was the passive receptacle for the white man’s lusts. Most of the Negroes arrived in America more morally pure than they are to-day. As savages, they were nearer to nature. Mentally and spiritually they are much higher now, but they have learned more about sin, and sin is written in most of their bodies. It is sharpest in the mulattoes and “near whites”—those whose ancestors were longest in slavery have the worst marks of it in them. The state of the last slaves to be imported into America is much simpler and happier than the rest. The moral character of the black Negroes is also simpler than that of the pallid ones. But this is anticipating my story. I set off to study the ex-slave because the civilized world is threatened by what may be called a vast slaves’ war. In Russia the grandchildren of the serfs have overthrown those who were once their masters, and have taken possession of the land and the state; in Germany Spartacus has arisen to overthrow the military slavery of Prussianism; and the wage slaves are rising in every land. There is a vast resentment of lower orders against upper orders, of the proletarians, who have nothing and are nothing, against those who through inheritance or achievement have reached the ruling class. The Negroes are in no way to be compared to the Russians in intellectual or spiritual capacity: they are racially so much more undeveloped. Much less divided Russian serf from Russian master than slave from planter. But it is just because the contrast between the American white man and American black man is so sharp and the quarrel so elemental in character that it has seemed worth while to explore the American situation. And if the struggle is more elemental, it can hardly be said that there is not more at stake. American industrialism is ravaged by waves of violent revolutionary ferment. If ill-treatment of the Blacks should at last force the twelve millions of them to make common cause with a revolutionary mob, polite America might be overwhelmed and the larger portion of the world be lost—if not of the world, at least of that world we call civilization.

What, then, of the Negro? What is he doing, what does he look like, what does he feel to-day? It is impossible to learn much from current books, so, following the dictum: “What is remarkable, learn to look at it with your own eyes,” I went to America to see.

I chose Olmsted as my model. In 1853 Olmsted made a famous journey through the seaboard States, holding up his mirror to the life of the South in slavery days. The book which records his impressions and reflections is one of the most valuable in American literature. This great student of nature went methodically through Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. A pilgrimage not unlike his has to be repeated to-day to ascertain how the ex-slave is, what he is doing, how the experiment of his liberation has prospered, and what is his future in the American Commonwealth. But as America is so much more developed in 1920, and more problematical in the varied fields of her national life, it has been necessary to make a broader, if more rapid, survey of the whole South. I made the following journey in America: I went slowly south from New York to Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, staying some days at each and seeing America grow darker as it visibly does when you watch faces from trolley car windows going from town to town southward. I was on South Street, in Philadelphia; watched the well-paid artisans and laborers at the docks of Baltimore, visited there the polite homes of the colored working class, cleaner, richer, cozier than that of the average British workman on Tyneside or London Docks. I climbed the Lincoln Heights to talk to Nanny Burroughs and see her good training college for colored women there; was at Howard University and talked with black and gentle Professor Miller and with the pale and intellectual Emmett Scott. I sailed down the Potomac to Norfolk, Virginia, Uncle Sam’s great naval base, going to be the greatest of its kind in the world; crossed to Newport News and talked with black rivetters and chippers and others in the shipbuilding yards; then, following the way of the first English colonists and also the first Negro slaves, went up the James River to Jamestown, and on to Richmond, the fine capital of the Old Dominion. I traveled to Lynchburg and its tobacco industries, went from thence to “sober” Knoxville, investigating the race riot there and the attitude of Tennessee. From Knoxville I went to Chattanooga and Birmingham, in each of which great steel centers I met the leading Negroes and investigated conditions. I was at Atlanta, and walked across Georgia to the sea, following Sherman. A three-hundred-mile walk through the cotton fields and forests of Georgia was necessary in order to get a broad section of the mass of the people. The impression left behind by Sherman’s army which laid waste the country and freed all the Negroes there gave also something of the historical atmosphere of the South. From Savannah, which was the point on the sea to which General Sherman attained, I went to Brunswick and Jacksonville, thence to Pensacola, and on from Florida to New Orleans and the Gulf plantations. I journeyed up the Mississippi on a river steamer, stayed at the Negro city of Mound Bayou, was at Vicksburg and Greenville and Memphis, and then repaired once more to the contrasting North.

Crossing the Mason-Dixon line was rather a magical and wonderful event for me. After all, the North, with its mighty cities and industrialized populations, is merely prose to one who comes from England. Pennsylvania is a projection of Lancashire and Yorkshire, New York is a projection of London, and massive Washington has something of the oppressiveness of English park drives and Wellingtonias. But southward one divines another and a better country. It has a glamour; it lures. There the orange grows and there are palms; there is a hotter sun and brighter flowers. Human beings there, one surmises, have a more romantic disposition and warmer imagination. Reposing on the vast feudalism of Negro labor there is a more stately way of living, life is more spacious. And at the resorts on the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico a great number of people live for pleasure and happiness, and not for business and ambition.

I journeyed on a white-painted steamer in the evening down the Potomac to Old Point Comfort, leaving behind me the noise and glare of Washington and the hustle of Northern American civilization. It was the crossing of a frontier—without show of passports or examination of trunks, the passing to a new country, with a different language and different ways. The utter silence of the river was a great contrast to the clangor of the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore and the string of towns I had been passing through on my way South. Sunset was reflected deep in the stream, and mists crept over the surface of the water. Then the moon silvered down on our course, my cabin window was full open and the moon looked in. I lay in a capacious sort of cottage bed and was enchanted by the idea of going to “Dixie,” of which we had all sung so much; and the soft Southern airs and night and the throbbing of the river steamer gliding over the placid water gave an assurance of some new refreshment of spirit. With a quaint irrelevance the whole British army, and indeed the nation, had been singing “Dixie” songs throughout the war—“Just try to picture me, way down in Tennessee” we were always asking of one another. Now, behold, the war was over, and it might be possible to go there and forget a little about all that sordid and tumultuous European quarrel.

All night the river whispered its name and lulled the boat to sleep. Dawn on the broad serenity of the waters at Old Point Comfort was utterly unlike the North, from which I had come, and the last ten days of jangling trolley cars hustling along shoppy streets. A morning star shone in the pale-blue sky, lighting as it were a vestal lamp over the coast, and we looked upon Virginia. As the sun rose, vapor closed in the scene. We made the port of Norfolk in a mist which seemed each moment getting warmer. The chill winds of October were due in the North, but Virginia was immune. During the week I spent in the city of Norfolk and on Hampton Roads it did not get less than 85 in the shade, even at night. The weather, however, was hotter than is usual even in Eastern Virginia at that time of the year.

I obtained the impression of a great city rather cramped for want of space, and in this I suppose I was right. By all accounts Norfolk has trebled its population during the war, and needs to have its center rebuilt spaciously and worthily. When Olmsted came through in 1853 he records that Norfolk was a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, having no lyceum or public library, no gardens, no art galleries, and though possessing two “Bethels” having no “Seamen’s Home” and no place of healthy amusement. He rather makes fun of a Lieutenant Maury, who in those days was having a vision of the Norfolk of the future, and saw it one of the greatest ports in the world, being midmost point of the Atlantic coast and having an inner and an outer harbor with perfect facilities of ingress and egress in all weathers.

To-day Lieutenant Maury’s vision has proved prophetic. In the maps of the new America which is coming, Norfolk is destined to be printed in ever larger letters. The war showed the way. The determination of America to be worthily armed at sea made it certain, and the future of Norfolk, with Hampton Roads and Newport News, is to be the primary naval base of the Atlantic coast. The military and naval activities of Norfolk during the war were very important. Eastern Virginia was a great training ground, and Norfolk the main port of embarkation of troops for Europe. Shipbuilding and naval construction also were in full swing. Great numbers of laborers, especially Negroes, seem to have been attracted. The number no doubt is exaggerated, but the colored people there number themselves now at one hundred thousand. They have been attracted by the high wages and the record of Norfolk for immunity from mob violence. A lynching is not in anyone’s remembrance. Trouble might have broken out during the war, but Norfolk possessed an excellent “City Manager” who was always prepared.

On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to “clean up colored town,” but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of colored crews and troops started an attack on the town jail, but a few armed men quickly dispersed them.

I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted. Their eyes were more goggly. They were more odorous. When the black chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a pungent and sickening odor. The elevator reeked with this odor. It was the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on the trolley cars. It was wafted among the vegetables and fruit of the city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a while and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into perfectly fresh linen came into his presence, the Indian felt sick. Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men, but were too subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox, and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably be argued that the terrible odor of the Blacks is due to their greater proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I quite see that this odor is something which the Negro will have difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about it, as about his kinky hair, and that the more educated and refined he became the more he strove to get rid of these marks. That explained to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every corner there was a “Beauty Parlor,” where specialists plied Mme. Walker’s “Anti-Kink,” and why the prosperous Negro workingman demanded a bathroom and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in “Jim Crow” sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.

The colored folk here, moreover, seemed to talk more in the way they are supposed to talk, and are not mincing the American tongue, as in the North. Outside my room one maid says: “You’s a fool, sister Ann.” “Yas, sister Sue, dat’s ‘zackly what I am,” says the other, and laughs and repeats it as if it were the greatest joke—“Dat’s ‘zackly what I am.”

I went into the streets to seek the Rev. B——, a leading colored preacher of Norfolk. I stood in wonderment before a whitewashed chapel with large china-blue stained-glass windows luridly depicting our Lord’s baptism and the opening of the heavens over the Jordan. A grizzled old Negro in a cotton shirt stopped in front of me and exclaimed insinuatingly, “You’s looking at cullud folks’ church; ain’t it bewtiful?” I took the opportunity to ask for the Rev. B——. He led me along and pointed up a flight of wooden steps to a sufficiently handsome dwelling place.

Rev. B—— on seeing me had a gleam of doubt on his face for perhaps one second, but only for a second. One instinctively felt that here in Virginia, where the color line is sharply drawn, no white man is likely to present himself on terms of equality to a black man without the desire to patronize or some guile of some kind. It is rare for any white man to call upon any educated black man, and very rarely indeed that he comes to him in a straightforward, honest, and sincere manner. So the Rev. B—— showed doubt for a moment, and then suddenly, after a few words, his doubt vanished. In my subsequent journeying and adventures it was always thus—doubt at first glance, and then, rapidly, the awakening of implicit trust and confidence. I personally found the Negroes nearly always friendly. Mr. B—— was a sparely-colored, lean, intellectual young man, a capable white man in a veil of dark skin. He was all but white. I looked at his webby hands—what a pity, it seemed, that, being so near, he could not be altogether. And yet I realized that in such men and women, no matter how fair they be, the psyche is different. There is something intensely and insolubly Negro in even the nearest of near whites.

Rev. B—— took me all over the city. He was evidently extremely well known to the colored people, for our conversation was intertwined with a ceaseless——

“How do, Revrun?”

“How do?”

He showed me his charmingly built church (not that with the china-blue windows), contrived in graceful horseshoe style, with graduated, sloping gallery, richly-stained windows, and a vast array of red-cushioned seats. A black organist was discoursing upon the organ, and a voluminous, dusky charwoman with large arms was cleaning and dusting among the pews below.

There sat under Rev. B—— every Sunday a fair share of the quality colored folk of Norfolk. “I am glad that you have come to me, because I can show you an up-to-date and proper church,” said the pastor. “There are nine or ten like this in Norfolk, but when a stranger asks to see a Negro church he’s usually taken to some out-of-the-way tabernacle of the Holy Folks or some queer sect where everyone is shouting Hallelujah, and it all seems very funny. But if you’ll come to me on Sunday morning you’ll hear a service which for dignity and spiritual comeliness will compare with any white man’s service in any part of the world. You mustn’t think of us as still cotton pickers and minstrels and nothing more. There is a great deal of Negro wealth and refinement in this city of Norfolk.”

“How do you get on with white ministers?” I asked. “Do you work together?”

“Oh, white ministers do not recognize black ones on the street,” said he. “My neighbor, for instance, knows me well enough at the Baptist Conference, and by his talk I see he knows all about my church. But here in the city he cannot afford to know me. Yet he has not half so many worshippers at his church, nor do they pay him half the salary which my people pay me. He dare not spend on his clothes what I spend; he has not such a well-appointed home. Yet if we meet on the street—he doesn’t know me.”

This was evidently a sore point.

We went to Brown’s Bank. Brown has gone to Philadelphia to start a second Negro bank. The first one has been in existence ten years. Brown is a financier, and something more than that. For he encourages the Negro theatres and is greatly helping his people along their way. We also visited the polite edifice of the Tidewater Bank and Trust Company, which has been built since the Armistice. “It was contracted for by Negroes and built by Negroes alone,” said the treasurer proudly—a blunt, bullet-headed, whimsical fellow, with an intense desire to push business and to hustle. All the clerks and stenographers were colored. Each teller sat in his steel cage for which he alone held the key. All the latest banking machinery was in operation, including the coin separator and counter and wrapper, and the adding machine. I worked an imaginary account under colored direction, using the adding machine, and gave assent to its infallibility. They showed me their strong room, and I peeped at their cash reserves. The treasurer and “Revrun” then took me up into a high mountain, namely, the Board Room, which was in a gallery overlooking the whole of the working part of the bank.

“My motto,” said the treasurer, “is, ‘Folks who only work for us as long as they are paid will find they are only paid for what they have done.’ We work here till we are through, be it eleven or twelve o’clock at night. The man who isn’t hard is not for us.”

We talked about the Negro.

“He must win freedom,” said the banker. “It is never a bequest, but a conquest. You can’t have redemption without the shedding of the Precious Blood, can you, Reverend? I am fighting for the Negro by succeeding in business. There’s only one thing that can bring him respect, and that is achievement.”

These were his most impressive words. We walked out of the new bank.

“He has his knock-about car and his limousine and a finely appointed house and a governess for his children,” said Rev. B——, as we footed it once more in the sun-bathed street. “But of course you can be a millionaire to-day and it won’t help you to marry even the poorest white girl. Or you can be a Negro heiress, but no amount of wealth will induce a white man to marry a colored girl. For the matter of that, though, there are Negroes so white you couldn’t tell the difference, and we’ve got plenty to choose from if our tastes lie that way. If a Negro wants to marry a white, he can find plenty within his own race.”

Rev. B—— was himself married to a woman who could pass as white, in Southern Europe, and his children were little white darlings with curly hair. We hailed a heavy “F and D” car. I will not mention the actual name of the build. A young colored dandy was sitting in it. “You see this car?” said Reverend. “It belongs to Dr. R——. It’s an ‘F and D.’ In many places the agents will not sell this build of car to a Negro, even for cash down.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, it’s a fine type of car, and rich white men in a city don’t care to see a colored man going about in one exactly the same. An agent would lose business if he sold them to Negroes. What’s more, whether he lost business or not, he wouldn’t do it. Here in Virginia, however, there is not so much prejudice, but when you go further South you’ll find it.”

We got into the car. The young dandy proved to be a doctor’s assistant, a sort of apprentice to the great physician we were about to meet. He had graduated at Fisk, which he called the Negro Athens. He was dressed in a well-cut suit of gray, a rich necktie, and a felt hat which was in excellent taste. His complexion was of the cocoa-brown, highly-polished type, and his large eyes were quiet and reflective, as if unawakened to the joy of life. Politely chatting to us, he guided the beautiful car along some of the most terribly rutty and broken streets.

“We pay equal taxes,” said he, “but because colored people live in these streets the city won’t repair the roads. They are all rich people living in these houses, all Negroes. Several of them own cars.... Now look on the other hand at this street. It’s a white street, all smoothly repaired. What a beautiful surface; see the difference!” Rev. B—— urged this point also. It was a striking example of inequality, and one that makes a strong appeal.

Dr. R—— proved to be a rich practitioner living in a delightful villa with polished floors and a French neatness and charm in the furniture and decorations. The sun blinds were all down, and a pleasant creamy light was diffused upon his books and pictures and silk-upholstered divan. He was very busy, but said he could always spare a few moments from his profession if it were a question of helping his race, and he thought nothing could help the Negroes more than a dispassionate review of their situation by a white man who could bring it not merely before America, but before the world. He had more patients than he could deal with, all Negroes, with the exception of a few Jews. The Jews have no prejudice, and are ready to be attended by a good doctor, whatever the color of his skin, which is a point in any case in favor of the Jews. For a long while the Negroes distrusted their own doctors, and thought that only a white man could possibly have the skill to treat them. But a later generation has discovered that their own folk have an excellent grasp of medicine. My further acquaintance with a considerable number of colored doctors in the South has led me to the conclusion that their temperament suits them admirably. They make good doctors. What is more, they naturally understand the Negro’s body and constitution and nervous system better than the white man, and the pathology of the Negro is very different from that of the white man. The white doctor as yet has not given much separate study to the Negro’s body—though it is certainly very different from ours in many ways. He is inclined perhaps to be a little brutal and offhand with Negro patients—and they certainly are tiresome, with their superstitious fear of ill health and evil eyes, and what not. This impatience has helped the colored practitioner. Negroes, like other people, go where they are best treated, and the medical attendance upon a hundred thousand people could make many doctors rich.

In the old slavery days the Negroes were just a broad base where all were equal. To-day the “race” has lifted up an intelligent and professional class. The working Negro population of Norfolk could lift up its intellectual apex of minister, doctor, and banker, and make them comparatively rich men, and give them all the show of luxury and culture which would have been the lot of white men in similar positions. So the broad base of slavery grows to be a pyramid of freedom.

Dr. R—— was a shrewd, capable, little human mountain. He said, “I think the time has come for the Negro to amass wealth; it’s the only thing that counts in America.” He thought the League of Nations might help the Negro if its representatives ever met at Washington. There would be Frenchmen and Englishmen and Italians, and, being so near to the South, it would be a shame to America if lynchings took place while they were sitting. As it was, the Negro South was a sort of skeleton cupboard which must not be exposed.

From him I learned first that the Negro had not access to the Carnegie libraries in the South. I was surprised. Up at Baltimore, in the North, I was talking to a librarian, and he averred that the Negroes used the public library much more than white people, and that there were so many darkies that Whites did not care to go. But I travel such a very short distance South, and I find no Negro admitted at all.

“Surely that is contrary to the spirit of the Carnegie grants,” said I.

“Yes, for Carnegie was a good friend to the Negro. But so it is,” said Dr. R——. “And I do not think Negroes should agitate about it. It would be better for Negroes to build their own libraries. We shall have to do so. But we don’t want to intrude where we’re not wanted.”

He told me what he considered the most thrilling moment of his life. He was out with a friend at midnight watching the posting of election results, when suddenly a “lewd woman” came out of a house door, screaming and waving her arms. She made right for them, and they were in terror lest she should fall down at their feet or start reviling them. Fortunately, they had the presence of mind not to run away from her, or they might have been lynched by the crowd.

The worthy doctor took us out and drove us all over the city, heartily apologizing that he could not ask me to have any meal with his wife and himself. “For, although you may have no prejudice, it would not be safe for either of us if it were known.” Which was indeed so. Throughout the whole of the South it is impossible to eat or drink with a colored man or woman.

My chief way of finding people to whom I had introductions was by reference to the city directory. Here I found that all colored people were marked with a star—as much as to say, “Watch out; this party’s colored.” White women were indicated as “Mrs.” or “Miss,” but colored women always as plain “Sarah Jones” or “Betty Thompson,” or whatever the name might be, without any prefix. This I discovered to be one of many small grievances of the Negro population, akin to that of not having their roads mended though they pay taxes, and being obliged to take back seats behind a straw screen in the trolley cars.

It was a novel impression in the Negro church on Sunday morning. I came rather early, and found an adult Bible class discussing theology in groups. One man near me exclaimed, “It says ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,’ doesn’t it, brother? Well, then, I believe, so why argufy? I an’t a-goin’ to take no chances. No, sir, I an’t a-goin’ to do it”—a serene black child of forty years or so.

In the full congregation were all types of Negroes. The men were undistinguished, but the women were very striking. One lady wore a gilded skirt and a broad-brimmed, black straw hat. Two Cleopatras sat in front of me—tall, elegant, graceful, expensively dressed as in Mayfair, one in chiffon, the other in soft gray satin, tiny gold chains about their necks, pearl earrings in their ears. They had smooth, fruit-like cheeks, curving outward to perfect bell mouths. When they sang they lifted their full, dusky throats like grand birds. They were evidently of the Élite of Norfolk. On the other hand, there were numbers of baggy and voluminous ladies with enormous bosoms, almost visibly perspiring. They thronged and they thronged, and all the red-cushioned seats filled up. There were men of all types, from the perfect West African Negro to the polished American Arab, yellow men, brown men, lots with large tortoise-shell spectacles, all with close-cropped hair which showed the Runic lines of their hard heads. Fans were provided for every worshipper, and noisy religious and family talk filled the whole chapel.

We began with some fine singing—not deep and harmonious and complex as that of the Russians, but hard, resonant, and breezy, followed by conventional prayers and the reading of the Scriptures. The pastor then sent someone to ask me if I would come forward and give them Christian greeting in a few words. I was much astonished, as I did not know one ever broke into the midst of Divine Service in that way. However, I came forward and confronted the strange sea of dusky, eager faces and the thousand waving paper fans, and I said: “Dear brothers and sisters, I am an Englishman and a white man, but before these I am a Christian. In Christ, as you know, there is neither white nor black, neither inferiority nor superiority of race, unless it is that sometimes the first shall be last and the last first. We know little about the American Negro in England, but I have come to find out. I have not been sent by anybody, but was just prompted by the Spirit to come out here and make your acquaintance, and so bring tidings home to England. I hope you will take that as an assurance of loving interest in you, and a promise for the future. I am glad to see you have made such progress since slavery days and have in Norfolk fine houses and churches and banks and a theatre and restaurants and businesses, and that you have such a large measure of happiness and freedom. I believe you have great gifts to offer on the altar of American civilization, and so far from remaining a problem you will prove a treasure.” And I told some touching words of my friend Hugh Chapman, of the chapel of the Savoy, in London: “Mankind is saved, not by a white man, or by a black, but by one who combines both—the little brown Man of Nazareth.”

It was a strange sensation, that of facing the Negro congregation. I could find no touch, no point of contact, could indeed take nothing from them. The spiritual atmosphere was an entirely different one from that of a gathering of Whites. I should have been inclined to say that there was no spiritual atmosphere whatever. For me it was like speaking to an empty room and a vast collection of empty seats. But I know there was something there, though I could not realize it.

After the service there came up to me a purely delightful creature, full of an almost dangerous ardor for what I had said. She was the leading spirit at the Liberty Club for colored soldiers and jack tars. In the afternoon I listened to some wonderful singing at another church. The little black organist woman sang at the top of her voice while she bent over the keys, and waved the spirit into her choir by eager movements with the back of her hand.

“Take me, shake me, don’t let me sleep,” they sang, and it was infinitely worth while. I felt that in the great ultimate harmony we could not do without this voice, the voice of the praise of the dark children.

Next week I went over to Newport News. On a wall in Norfolk I read: “T. Adkins, Newport News,” and underneath someone had written, “You could not pay me to live there: Robert Johnson, Norfolk.”

That might possibly explain the relativity of the two places. Newport News is a ramshackle settlement on the sands across the water from Norfolk. It has a nondescript, ill-dressed, well-paid, wild, working-class population, with all manner of cheap shops and low lodging houses. On every fifth window seems to be scrawled in whitewash, “HOT DOG 5 cents.” It was explained to me that this is sausage of a rather poor quality. I had never seen the article so frankly named elsewhere. For the rest, a good deal of manifest immorality strolls the streets at night or is voiced on dark verandas. The police station is a place of considerable mystery and glamour, and I should say Newport News at this season would have proved an interesting research for the vice raker. I paid three dollars for a room whose lock had been burst off, and one of whose windows was broken, a mosquito-infested hovel, but the only room obtainable.

A very interesting young colored trainer took me over the shipbuilding yards the next day. He was an enthusiastic boxer, and I asked him the cause of Negro excellence in this sport. For there are at least three Negro boxers whom no white boxers have been able to beat, and this excellence has caused the championship rules to be altered so as to disqualify colored champions.

He said it was due to quicker eye and greater aggressiveness, above all to greater aggressiveness. The Negro is a born fighter. It is true he has greater endurance and a much harder skull, but he has also remarkable aptitude.

“Has the Negro boxer more science?” I asked.

“No, perhaps not so much. He has fighting blood, that’s what it is. His ancestors fought for thousands of years.”

I remarked that the red Indians fought also, but they were poor boxers. He put that down to slight physique.

“I got tired of watching boxing matches in the army,” said I. “The bulkier and more brutal types always seemed to get the better of those who were merely skillful. I expect that is why we don’t like watching a Negro and a white man boxing, it is too much a triumph of body over mind.”

“There’s no finer sight than to watch two Negroes well matched,” said the trainer, with a smile.

I thought good boxing showed more the animal side of a man, and I recalled a reported saying of Jack Johnson—“I’se ready to fight mos’ any man that they is, an’ if ye cahn find any man, why, just send me down a great big black Russian bear....”

“It jarred the white folk terrible bad that Jack Johnson was the real champion of the world,” said the trainer. “When the news came through of Jack Johnson beating Jeffries so far away as Denver, Colorado, the white folk began pulling the Negroes off the street cars in Norfolk, Virginia, and beating them, just to vent their rage, they were so sore.”

I thought that rather amusing, but the trainer took a gloomy view. However, in we went to the shipbuilding yard and looked at many great vessels in dry dock. Out came a motley crowd of men, blacker than their nature through the dirt of their work. The ship painters were splashed from head to foot with the characteristic red paint of ships, and looked like some new tribe; the blue-shirted rivetters and chippers were all frayed and ragged from contact with sharp edges and iron. These Negro workers were very happy and jolly. They seemed nearly all to be on piecework and earned in most cases ten dollars a day, and in some exceptional cases and upon occasion twenty or twenty-five dollars. The rivetters, according to the scale of pay, seemed to be capable of earning huge wages, and many of them were comparatively well off, possessing their homes, and giving their children a good education. The trainer pointed out to me his athletic pets. He was employed by the company to organize competitions and races and baseball teams and the like. The strongest Negroes seemed among the gentlest. The heavyweight champion was a large and beautiful child. He never lost his temper in the ring, because, as I was told, he never needed to. His ears were not turned to “cauliflower” and his nose was not flattened out—as yet.

The lunch hour was remarkable for the swarms of men belched forth by the works. A twenty-cent lunch was ready for all. Wives and mothers also were allowed to come and bring food to supplement what was served at the stands. Lunch over, the men formed into groups, and in some places there were Bible discussions, in others sporting competitions. Despite high wages, I noticed some Negroes going about picking up crusts and putting them into paper bags, presumably to feed the chickens with when they got home. My guide said this was due to the “Save” propaganda which had been carried on. Y. M. C. A. work was very much to the fore, an industrial “Y” having been financed by the owners of the yard. I was told that a little while ago the company found it difficult to keep the young Negro boys—the heaters and passers, on whose work the rivetter depends, for one boy heats the rivet and another passes it, and the rivetter strikes it home. They found so little in the place to interest them that they drifted away from the works. It was this that had determined the firm to embark on a program of physical culture and games. There was also a Y. M. C. A. hut and its usual appurtenances. A long list of evening classes was being arranged. A large building had been promised to the “Y” if it made good.

I could not find any man who belonged to a genuine trade-union affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, though most belonged to “Colored People’s Brotherhoods.” The Whites with whom they worked, and with whom they have upon occasion great rivetting competitions, were presumably non-union also, but that is common; labor in America is poorly organized, compared with labor in Great Britain. Almost the whole of Negro labor is at present outside the recognized unions, and for that reason can almost always be used to break strikes. This is, of course, unfortunate for the Negro, who is thus branded as a “blackleg” in addition to being black by nature, which was reproach enough.

I met a strange character in the evening, one of the colored organizers, a friend of the white men, and in with the bosses of the yards. He was possibly a descendant of the type of Negro who in slavery days acted as agent for the slave merchants, and was to be found on the West African shore lording it over the batches of poor savages who with hands tied up were being hustled on to the slave ships. It used to be a recognizable type. When they themselves were brought over to America they became overseers or field drivers, and brutal enough they were to their fellow men of color. To-day they are foremen or speeders up of Negro gangs, or you find them under the auspices of “Welfare.”

This was a lazy Negro, fat and heavy, with a confused non-thinking mind, great sooty lips, and bloodshot eyes. He told me he put on a wig at night and prowled about the town, spying on vice. The great numbers of black soldiers embarking or disembarking had attracted sharps and bad women of all kinds. The streets were infested with sin, and he knew which boarding houses were disreputable and which were properly kept. He knew where there was drink, and who was organizing the “bootlegging” business, and what graft the police took. Though sluggish by nature, this gloomy soul evidently got full of life at night—spying on the people.

He told me the richest colored man in Newport News was a dentist who charged as much as six dollars an hour for stopping teeth. The example of this dentist’s success had caused several fathers to educate their children for dentistry rather than the Church or the Law. “But we Negroes don’t want to rise,” said he. “We want to show off. We are great imitators of swagger. They’ll come wearing a forty-dollar suit and a clean collar, and brandish a cigar in your face when that is all they have in the world. We’re a crude people, sir.”

There was on the one hand in Newport News a nucleus of prosperous Negro families, and on the other hand the many gambling places and dancing dens where health and ambition and money, and everything else which can help a man to rise could be squandered. In time to come, when society takes root, Newport News should become a Negro stronghold. Already there are so many Negroes no white man dare start a riot.

Not far from Newport News is Hampton Institute, the “Negro Eton,” which produces the Curzons and the Cecils of the colored race, as someone amusingly expressed it. It is the crown of Northern effort to educate the Negro. Endowment and instruction are mostly by Whites. Everyone is engaged in vital self-support, and the students plough the fields, make boots, build wagons, print books, and learn all manner of practical lessons in life. Above all, they are made ready to teach and help others of their race. It is the show place of the Negro world, and rightly so, as most of those who lead Negrodom hail as yet from Hampton.

I did not myself visit Hampton, because it has been adequately described in books, and generally speaking I would rather study the Negro in his unperfumed haunts, where he is less disguised with Northern culture. Perhaps one learns more of the needs and requirements of the Negroes by visiting a poor school where the ordinary routine of teaching is going on. I visited a high school named after Booker T. Washington, and talked to the students in the classes. The young lady who took me to the head master wore a low-cut, white blouse from which her dainty neck and her head of kinky hair grew like a palm tree. She had dog’s teeth for eardrops hanging from her ears, and large, kind, questioning eyes. The head master was a quiet young man from some Negro university, full of pent-up enthusiasm for his race and for learning. He had boundless enthusiasm for the Negro people and their possibilities. Was not the greatest French writer a colored man, and the greatest Russian poet of Negro blood? We went into the composition class. They were doing “Argumentation,” which is perhaps a trifle dull, but we discussed brevity and the principle of suspense. In the English class each child had read “Silas Marner” and was taking it in turn to re-tell the story when called upon by the teacher. This was pretty well done, though Americanisms were frequent, and the two brothers were said to be “disagreeable” when it was meant that they disagreed. In French the whole class was standing around the walls of the room, writing French sentences on the blackboards fitted into the panelling. French was very popular. Every child wanted to go to France by and by. In the Latin class we discussed the merits of CÆsar, in the cookery class whether they ate what they cooked, in the needlework, invisible mending—when suddenly the fire bell sounded. Each class at once got up and filed out in orderly manner. In one minute the whole school of seven hundred black children was cleared. Then they marched back in twos, shoulder to shoulder, in fine style, to the rub-a-dub-dub of a kettledrum. It was a surprise alarm, called by a visiting fire inspector. None, even of the teachers, had known whether the alarm was real.

The teachers here were all black, and possessed of the greatest enthusiasm; the children presented some hopeless types, but they were mostly very eager and intelligent. The methods of teaching seemed to be advanced, but there were many deficiencies, notably that of the chemistry class, where all the apparatus was in a tiny cupboard, and consisted of some bits of tubing, a few old test tubes, and some empty bottles.

It was a grievance, and I thought a legitimate one, that whereas the white schools were given good buildings with every latest convenience, less was thought good enough for the Negro children. Though white sympathizers with the ex-slave had been very generous in endowing Negro education, their good work was more than neutralized by the Southern local authorities, who held the point of view that education spoiled the “nigger.” If it were not for the enthusiasm of the Negro teachers, who carry on in any circumstances, it might easily have happened that the colored people had a whole series of well-endowed universities and colleges like Fisk and Hampton, but no elementary or secondary school education worth the name.

Lack of good will toward the Negro thus expresses itself in many ways; the failure to repair his roads, the failure to give him equal facilities for education and self-improvement, and his exclusion from the public libraries. The white man will not say “No” to grants of money which give him handsome Carnegie library buildings for nothing or will raise universities, even Negro universities, but he will not fulfill his part of the unwritten contract—and honor all philanthropy by indiscriminate good will.

After visiting the school I saw glimpses of Negro women at work in characteristic places of earning a living. The management was always very sensitive about strangers being present, so it was possible to find out little about the conditions. One shop was full of girls sewing ready-cut trousers on machines run by electricity. The trousers were cut in Baltimore and sent down here to be sewn cheaply by local colored labor. A Jew was in charge. A Negro woman was looking after the “welfare” of the girls. Another was a tobacco factory, where girls earned eleven dollars a week, working from 7:30 a. m. to 5:30 p. m., stripping tobacco leaf in airy and fragrant rooms. At piecework they earned from six cents a pound.

I visited the publishing office of the Journal and Guide, where the Negroes not only edit a paper but manufacture their own type and do everything themselves—one of a hundred Negro newspapers published in the United States. The average number of spelling errors in many of these sheets seemed to be about three a paragraph, but that in no wise renders them ridiculous or deters the pen of the ready writers. Negroes have a passion for journalism which is out of proportion to their present development and capacity.

As I came out of the publishing office with the editor we saw a hearse. It was drawn by a motor, and it was a new idea to me, that of being motored to one’s grave. The editor made a sign and the hearse stopped. “Just a moment,” said he, and a lugubriously cloaked Ethiopian with large, shining teeth stepped down.

“This is Undertaker Brown,” said the editor.

“Always at yo’ seyvice, sar,” said the undertaker. “Is yo’ thinking of taking a ride with me?”

I said I was not meditating on that sad course yet.

“It’s a fine hearse,” said Brown—“and look, they is steel clamps to keep the coffin steady (he swung open the rear doors) and speshal receppacles fo’ the flowers.”

I thanked him, and we shook hands effusively.

All the Negroes took charge of me. It was no difficult task to see their ways of life. It was impossible not to feel happy in the midst of their childish vivacity and enthusiasm and make-believe. Their grievances were almost lost sight of in the sunshine of prosperity in Eastern Virginia. Miss M—— told me how in the Red Cross drives during the war she “led the cullud folk over the top” and the vividness of her story of Negro vying with Negro as to who should subscribe most money, and how she defied the white “crackers” to continue lynching and persecuting them in the face of such patriotism as they had shown was not only instructive but extraordinarily amusing, and also touching; how a large audience of white people was listening to a combined “platform” of black and white orators, and Negro choirs were singing “spirituals” while the collection plates rolled round, and Miss M—— when she arrived at the hall was so dead-beat with rushing round the town all day that she fell in a faint and she prayed, “Lord, if I gain strength I’ll take it for a sign that I am to speak.” And she came to herself and went on to the platform and told the white folk straight—what she felt—how nine-tenths of her people could not spell the word Democracy and had indeed only just heard of it, and yet they sent their children to wounds and death, and they themselves subscribed their last dimes for patriotic causes. But what did America give in return? And at the end she overheard one of the worst “crackers” remark that he could not help admiring her, she was “so durned sincere.”

The last evening I spent in this corner of Virginia was at a resort of colored soldiers and sailors, and I had a talk with a boy who had held a commission in the Ninety-second Division, a black unit which had covered itself with glory in France. He was a lieutenant, and was at the taking of St. Mihiel. The Negro marines were also very interesting—eager, serious, and sober fellows. They were proud of being in Uncle Sam’s navy, but wanted a chance of advancement there, did not wish to remain twenty years in the same grade, but hoped desperately for a gold stripe in time, and the chance to become petty officer. Soldiers and sailors surged in and out of the hall, smoked cigarettes, drank soda, and chatted. I heard no foul talk, and I took much pleasure in their appearance. I felt what a fine body of guardians of their country could be made of them if once prejudice were finally overcome. In this part of Eastern Virginia, the apex of the South, the new black world seemed very promising and had gone far in its fifty-seven years of freedom.

The way from Norfolk to Richmond is up the James River, and I continued my journey on a boat that had evidently come from New York—redolent as it was of long-distance passengers. There was a seat, however, just under the captain’s lookout, and there was nothing before me but the progressing prow and the silver expanse of the river. A classical voyage this—for it was up the James River, named after James the First, that the first pioneers of Raleigh’s virgin land made their way. It is felt to be romantic, because they were not Roundheads nor Quakers nor Plymouth Brethren nor other sober-liveried folk, but gentlemen of sword and ruff, courtier-sailors who upon occasion would be ready to throw their cloaks in the mud for a Queen to tread upon. The tradition of courtier survives, and a rich man of Virginia is to-day a Virginian gentleman, though there is scarcely another State in America where the landed proprietors claim to be gentry. The James River is significant for another reason. At little Jamestown, which never came to anything as a city, the first Negro slaves were landed in America in 1618, and from the small beginning of one shipload three hundred years ago nation-wide Negrodom, with all its black millions, has arisen.

Virginia grew prosperous in the cultivation of tobacco, which remains to-day the staple production of a comparatively poor State. It is too far north for the cultivation of cotton, and though doubtless possessing great mineral wealth, industrial research has not gone so far as in Pennsylvania. It is essentially a conservative State. Slavery is said to have depressed its economic life so that neighboring Northern States, whose development began much later, easily overtook it. A somewhat patriarchal settled state of life took possession of Virginia, a new feudalism which was out of keeping with hustling and radical America. It is remarkable, however, how many lawmakers, administrators, soldiers, and Presidents Virginia has given to the United States. Starting with gentry, it has bred gentry.

And with regard to the Negro, the State has a good record. Despite the various inequalities of treatment and Jim-Crowism noticeable by anyone who is observant, there is little or no brutality or nigger-baiting. Lynching is rare, and it must be supposed the alleged Negro attacks upon white women must be rare also. Such relatively good conditions prevail in Virginia that the whole South takes shelter behind her. And as the proud Virginian reckons himself par excellence the Southerner, he is often annoyed when he reads of the worse treatment of the Negroes further south. Virginia should remember she is not the whole South, and she does not exert even a moral influence upon Georgia and Mississippi. In that respect she seems to be as helpless as New England and the Puritans, to whom politically she has generally been in opposition.

The old Virginian families bound the Negroes to them with undying devotion. They became part of the family, with all the license of pet children. They fought for them and assisted them in the Civil War with the creature-like devotion of clansmen for their chief. The “veterans” who still survive, Negroes like Robert E. Lee’s cook, who was one of many picturesque personalities at the Atlanta reunion, are of a different type from the Negroes of to-day. They identified themselves with their master and mistress’s estate and person in a way that is truly touching. Surely of all beings the Negro is capable of the strongest and most pathetic human attachments.

Freedom, however, and the new ideas blew autumnly over the Virginian summer. All changed. The family retinues broke up. The affections were alienated. The new race of Negro individualists arose. The old “mammies” and “uncles” were a people apart, and are dying out fast now. The new Negroes are with and for themselves. They make shift to be happy and to amuse themselves without the white man. And they have now their schools, their churches which are like religious clubs, their political societies, theatres, and other segregated interests.

These segregated interests have produced and tend to produce an ever-increasing Negro culture, and though that culture may be somewhat despised because of its humble beginnings, there seems no reason why it should not have a future which will compare with that of white America. But south of Richmond and south of Virginia there is progressively less of this Negro culture to be found. There are the oases of Tuskegee Institute and Atlanta and Fisk Universities, but white opinion is adverse to Negro education, and the black masses have been unable to over-crow their neighbors. In Richmond and north of it, however, the black man has leave to breathe awhile, and there are interesting developments.

Richmond, which in 1853 reminded Olmsted of Edinburgh in its picturesqueness, has now quintupled its population, and spread greatly. It is still a handsome city, and its center of Grecian Capitol and public gardens is very pleasant. It is the third blackest city in the United States, between thirty-five and forty per cent of its population being colored. A certain General Gabriel led an insurrection of Negro slaves against Richmond in 1801, and the city has always adopted itself as self-constituted warden of the white man’s safety. The city has, however, been free enough from disturbance since the Civil War. It has its well-endowed Negro colleges, and on the other hand its less satisfactorily placed elementary and secondary schools. As in Norfolk, Negro business is thriving, though it has deeper roots.

It is less promising west of Richmond. A duller economic life prevails, and conditions are more normal, less affected by the prosperity of war industrialism. I traveled by train to Lynchburg. As this was my first experience of trains south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was interested to observe the Jim Crow arrangements. The Negroes are kept to separate waiting rooms, and book their tickets at other booking windows, and they are put into separate carriages in the trains, and not allowed promiscuously with white people, as in the North. They have not quite so good accommodation, though they pay the same fare; sometimes there is less space, sometimes there is no separate smoking compartment. Drawing-room cars and “sleepers” are generally unavailable. Colored people consider it a great grievance, but it is probably the insult implied in their segregation that affects them most. There is not an enormous disparity in the comfort. Inability to obtain food on long-distance trains was often mentioned to me as the chief injustice, but the personal aspect of the matter was always to the fore: “We don’t want to mix in with white people, or with those who don’t want us. We can get on very well by ourselves ...” they were always protesting.

In the North, promiscuously seated black and white passengers all seem quite happy and at ease. Mixing them works well. There is never any hitch. In the South, however, segregation seems to be for the Negro’s good. The less personal contact he has with the white man the safer he is from sudden outbursts of racial feeling. Of course, the railway companies ought to give the Negro equal accommodation for equal fare, but that is another matter.

Lynchburg is a beautifully situated little city beside the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a great market for dark tobacco. It manufactures iron pipes, ploughs, boots and shoes, and a number of other articles, and boasts of “ideal labor conditions and no strikes.” It is named after the original planter, Charles Lynch, an Irish boy, who ran from home and married a Quaker. It lapsed from Quakerism to a very sinful state, and then is said to have been reformed by the Methodists. Now there is nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly at Lynchburg.

The public library seemed to have paused sick in 1905. It is called the Jones Memorial Library, an impressive white building with an array of white steps leading up to it. Jones himself, who was a business man and served a very short while in the war of North and South, is shown in full martial attire drawing his sword, halfway up the stone steps—as it were in act of driving readers away. A cold cloister-like air pervaded the building. Negroes were not permitted in, and white people did not enter much. The librarian, however, was unusually kind and obliging, and lent me a book without taking a deposit. This lady said she would rather sit next to a decent black woman in a train than to the average White.

“We all had our black mammies—they treated us as if we were their own babies. Can you blame us if sometimes we love them as our own flesh and blood? All the trouble we have is due to Northerners coming South. And if a Negro gets lynched, what a fuss is made of it!”

I met the manager of a tobacco warehouse. He was not willing that I should see his Negroes at work and talk to them, but he assured me in a bland way, cigar in hand, that his pickers were a jolly crowd who knew they were well paid and would never go on strike. He paid thirty to thirty-five cents the hour for Negro labor.

“The war has played the devil with the niggers,” said he. “It has spread about the idea of high wages. The North has been especially to blame, luring the niggers up there with the bait of big money. It has caused a rise in wages all over the South.”

His employees were unskilled. In his opinion no Negroes were ever used for skilled work. What I had to tell him of Newport News and its shipyards was beyond his comprehension. As for Hampton Institute, he averred that he had never heard that it produced capable artisans. In his opinion there had been some good Negro carpenters and wheelwrights in slavery, but none since. Freedom had been very bad for the Negro. Yes, he utterly approved of lynching. It was always justified, and mistakes were never made. He had a water-tight mind.

A mile or so away was Virginia College, a red-brick structure in the woods, where in happy seclusion a few hundred colored men and women were being enfranchised of civilization and culture. A student took me to his study-bedroom, hung with portraits of John Brown and Booker T. Washington. The Bible was still the most important book, and it occupied the pride of place, though it was interleaved with pages of the Negro radical monthly, The Crisis. The student was an intense and earnest boy with all the extra seriousness of persecuted race consciousness. He said, in a low voice, that he would do anything at any cost for his people. He said the present leaders of the Negro world would fail, because of narrow outlook, but the next leaders would win great victories for color. And he would be ready to follow the new leaders. What a contrast they were!—the boss of the tobacco factory, cigar in hand, “talking wise” on the nigger, and the quiet Negro intellectual in his college, whetting daily the sword of learning and ambition.