one for whites and one for Negroes. But when this new station was built the whole front was given up to white people, and the Negroes were assigned a side entrance, and a small waiting-room. Prominent coloured men regarded it as a new evidence of the crowding out of the Negro, the further attempt to give him unequal accommodations, to handicap him in his struggle for survival. A delegation was sent to the railroad people to protest, but to no purpose. Result: further bitterness. There are in the station two lunch-rooms, one for whites, one for Negroes. [Pg 34] A leading coloured 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 coloured 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 like the boycott of a labour 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 coloured 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 together 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 colour line I found evidences of it everywhere—literally in every department of life. In the theatres, Negroes never sit downstairs, but the galleries are black with them. Of course, white hotels and restaurants are entirely barred to Negroes, with the result that coloured people have their own eating and sleeping places, many 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 [Pg 35]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 in Atlanta, although other cities are developing good Negro hotels. Indeed one cannot long remain in the South without being impressed with extreme difficulties which beset the exceptional coloured man. [Pg 35] COMPANION PICTURES
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