Following the Color LineAn account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
room, one beautiful story I heard at Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So Miss Louise, the doctor’s daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.

“What are you doing out here this time of night?” he asked.

“Why,” she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, “I had to take Uncle Billy safely home.”

Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:

Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a Sleeping Car

Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky’s Jim Crow law into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car. When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C. H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New Mexico, and his wife [Pg 65]preparing to retire for the night. He demanded that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor refused.

[Pg 65]

After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured compartment.

I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers, but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white people—and who have been getting further and further away from them.

A White Man’s Problem

It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man’s problem than it 
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