Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/25

 The American Magazine volume LXIV - Where some of the Poorer Negroes live.jpg WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE between the homes of the two classes

A leading colored man said to me:

"No Negro goes to the lunch room in the station who can help it. We don't like the way we have been treated."

A Negro Boycott

Of course this was an unusually intelligent colored man, and he spoke for his own sort; how far the same feeling of a race consciousness strong enough to carry out such a boycott as this—and it is exactly like the boycott of a labor union—actuates the masses of ignorant Negroes, is a question upon which I hope to get more light as I proceed. I have already heard more than one colored leader complain that Negroes do not stand together. And a white planter, whom I met in the hotel, said a significant thing along this very line:

"If once the Negroes got togther and saved their money, they'd soon own the country, but they can't do it, and they never will."

After I had begun to trace the color line I found evidences of it everywhere—literally in every department of life. 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. 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.

In slavery time, many Negroes attended white churches and heard good preaching, 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 colored people, who are nothing if not religious, have some sixty churches of their own in Atlanta. Of course, the schools