on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.

Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is
almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where
the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and
directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the
races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often
attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other.
But the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally
meant the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers
of ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and
independent farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and
leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of
the whites, there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to
separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly
separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they
are beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries,
lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes
who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the
doings of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy;
and so on, throughout the category of means for intellectual
communication,--schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment,
and the like,--it is usually true that the very representatives of the
two races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to
be in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that
one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other
thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land
where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is
for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a
situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as
the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of
friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous
fellowship between t