Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/21

Rh ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat further back in order to make a place for a white man. I traveled a good deal, but I never saw a white person asked to vacate a back seat to make place for a Negro. I saw cars filled with white people, both front seats and back, and many Negroes standing.

At one time, when I was on a car the conductor shouted: "Here, you nigger, get back there," which the Negro, who had taken a seat too far forward, proceeded hastily to do. Of course, I am talking here of conditions as they are in Atlanta. I may find different circumstances in other cities, which I hope to develop when the time comes.

No other one point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among the Negroes as the Jim Crow car. I don't know how many Negroes replied to my question: "What is the chief cause of friction down here?" with a complaint of their treatment on street cars and in railroad trains.

Fundamentally, of course, they object to any separation which gives them inferior accommodations. This point of view—and I am trying to set down every point of view, both colored and white, exactly as I find it, is expressed in many ways. "We pay first-class fare," said one of the