After my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.

After

“Go down any morning to Judge Broyles’s court,” they said to me, “and you’ll see the lowest of the low.”

So I went down—the first of many visits I made to police and justice courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.

The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers, and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court. Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was said.

In a Southern Police Court

It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning carried over one hundred names—men,[Pg 46] women, and children, white and black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]

[Pg 46]

A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes, with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194 Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice, dissipation. Most of the cases, 

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