A Resume of Southern Conditions

The writer contrasts how talking about black people is “a prominent” topic in the South but is not in the North.

A Resume of Southern Conditions
Following The Color=Line.

I arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, on the first day of last November. The riot, which had taken place about six weeks before, and the city was still in the throes of self-examination and reconstruction. Public attention had been peculiarly riveted upon the facts of race relationships not only in Atlanta but throughout the South, and all manner of remedies and solutions were under sharp discussion. If I had traveled the country over. I could not have found a more favorable time or place to begin following the color line.
I had naturally expected to find people talking about the Negro, but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an overshadowing place in Southern affairs. In the North we have nothing at all like it; no question which so touching every act of life, in which every one, white or black, is so profoundly interested. In the North we are mildly concerned in many things; the South is overwhelmingly concerned in this one thing.
And this is not surprising, for the Negro in the South is both the labor problem and the servant question; he is pre-eminently the political issue, and his place, socially, is of daily and hourly discussion. A Negro minister I met told me a story of a boy who went as a sort of butler’s assistant in the home of a prominent family in Atlanta. His people were naturally curious about what went on in the white man’s house. One day they asked him:
“What do they talk about when they’s eating?”
The boy thought a moment; then he said:
“Mostly they discuss us culled folks.”
What Negroes Talk About
The same consuming interest exists among the Negroes. A very large part of their conversation deals with the race question. I had been at the Piedmont Hotel only a day or two when my Negro waiter began to take especially good care of me. He flecked off imaginary crumbs and gave me unnecessary spoons. Finally, when no one was at hand, he leaned over and said:
“I understand you’re down here to study the Negro problem.”
“Yes,” I said, a good deal surprised. “How did you know it?” “Well, sir.” he replied. “We’ve got ways of knowing things.”
He told me that the Negroes had been much disturbed ever since the riot and that he knew many of them who wanted to go North. “The South,” he said, “is getting to be too dangerous for colored people.” His language and pronunciation were surprisingly good. I found that he was a college student, and that he expected to study for the ministry.
“Do you talk much about these things among yourselves?” I asked.
“We don’t talk about much else,” he said. “It’s sort of life and death with us.”
Another curious thing happened not long afterwards. I was lunching with several fine Southern men, and they talked as usual with the greatest freedom in the full hearing of the Negro waiters. Somehow, I could not help watching to see if the Negroes took any notice of what was said. I wondered if they were sensitive. Finally I put the question to tone of my friends:
“Oh,” he said, “we never mind them; they don’t care.” One of the waiters instantly spoke up:
“No, don’t mind me; I’m only a block of wood.”
The Jim Crow Car
One of the points in which I was especially interested was the “Jim Crow” regulation, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains. Next to the question of Negro suffrage, I think the people of the North have heard more of the Jim Crow legislation than of anything else connected with the Negro problem. I have seen, so far, no better place than the streetcar for observing the points of human contact between the races, betraying as it does every shade of feeling upon the part of both. In almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically on anything like a common footing.
In their homes and in ordinary employment, they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free citizens each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years ago, the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat where he pleased, but gradually the Jim Crow laws or local regulations were passed forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car.
Since I have been here in Atlanta, the newspapers report two significant new developments in the policy of separation. In Savannah, Jim Crow ordinances have gone into effect for the first time, causing violent protestations on the part of the Negroes and a refusal by many of them to use the cars at all.

“A Resume of Southern Conditions,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed May 12, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/493.