entage of
the population. I would not be so foolish as to say that assaults upon
white women _may_ not take place anywhere, but as a matter of fact they
seem to occur chiefly in those regions where white and black meet as
competitors for ordinary labor. Beaufort County, South Carolina, has a
black population forming about 90 per cent of the total, yet I was told
last summer that but one case of rape had been known in the county, and
that took place on the back edge of the county where there are fewest
Negroes, and was committed by a non-resident black upon a non-resident
white. Certain it is that in this county, which includes many islands,
almost wholly inhabited by blacks, the white women have no fear of such
assaults. This is also the case in the Mississippi Delta. Mr. Stone
says: "Yet here we hear nothing about an ignorant mass of Negroes
dragging the white man down; we hear of no black incubus; we have few
midnight assassinations and fewer lynchings. The violation by a Negro of
the person of a white woman is with us an unknown crime; nowhere is the
line marking the social separation of the races more rigidly drawn,
nowhere are the relations between the races more kindly. With us race
riots are unknown, and we have but one Negro problem--though that
constantly confronts us--how to secure more Negroes." Evidently when we
hear reports of states of siege and rumors of race war, we are not to
understand that this is the normal, typical condition of the entire
South. If this is the real situation, it seems clear that the
geographical segregation plays no mean part in determining the relation
of the two races. It is safe to say that there is a different feeling
between the races in the districts where the white is known only as the
leader and those in which he comes into competition with the black. What
is the significance of this for the future?

The same condition exists in the cities, and of this Professor Dubois
has taken note: "Savannah is an old city where the class of masters
among the whites and of trained and confidential slaves among the
Negroes formed an exceptionally large part of the population. The result
has been unusual good feeling between the races, and the entrance of
Negroes into all walks of industrial life, with little or no
opposition." "Atlanta, on the other hand, is quite opposite in
character. Here the poor whites from North Georgia who neither owned
slaves nor had any acquaintance with Negro cha