Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/22

 A Professor and some students of Gammon Theological Seminary

leading Negroes in Atlanta, "exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. We don't know when we may be dislodged from our seats to make place for a white man who has paid no more than we have. I say it isn't fair."

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.

The committee admitted that the Negroes were not always well treated on the cars, and promised to improve conditions. Charles T. Hopkins, a leader in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging to the Negroes. Two other leading men, on a different occasion, told me the same thing. It is, however, a rare practice.