they know. A Negro cook often supports her whole family, including a lazy husband, on what she gets daily from the white man’s kitchen. In some old families the “basket habit” of the Negroes is taken for granted; in the newer ones, it is, significantly, beginning to be called stealing, showing that the old order is passing and that the Negro is being held more and more strictly to account, not as a dependent vassal, but as a moral being, who must rest upon his own responsibility.

And often a Negro of the old sort will literally bulldoze his hereditary white protector into the loan of quarters and half dollars, which both know will never be paid back.

Mr. Brittain, superintendent of schools in Fulton County, gave me an incident in point. A big Negro with whom he was wholly unacquainted came to his office one day, and demanded—he did not ask, but demanded—a job.

“What’s your name?” asked the superintendent.

“Marion Luther Brittain,” was the reply.

“That sounds familiar,” said Mr. Brittain—it being, indeed, his own name.

“Yas, sah. Ah’m the son of yo’ ol’ mammy.”

In short, Marion Luther had grown up on the old plantation; it was the spirit of the hereditary vassal demanding the protection and support of the hereditary baron, and he got it, of course.

The Negro who makes his appeal on the basis of this old[Pg 38] relationship finds no more indulgent or generous friend than the Southern white man, indulgent to the point of excusing thievery and other petty offences, but the moment he assumes or demands any other relationship or stands up as an independent citizen, the white men—at least some white men—turn upon him with the fiercest hostility. The incident of the associated charities may now be understood. It was not necessarily cruelty to a cold or hungry Negro that inspired the demand of the irate subscriber, but the feeling that the associated charities helped Negroes and whites on the same basis, as men; that, therefore, it encouraged “social equality,” and that, therefore, it was to be stopped.

[Pg 38]

Most of the examples so far given are along the line of social contact, where, of course, the repulsion is intense. Negroes and whites can go to different schools, churches, and saloons, and sit in 

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