rangement for their children. For this reason
they are not reluctant to send their sons away from home. Should
the children remain there, they live in a state of anxiety for their
safety. They would not have them grow up as they, encompassed by
restraints, and the young men themselves appear to entertain toward
the prevailing system a more aggressive hostility.

A woman of color in Greenville, Mississippi, for example, had a son
in a northern State and was afraid to invite him home to pay a visit
because, as she stated, "for him to accept the same abuses to which
we, his parents, are accustomed, would make him much less than the man
we would have him be." Another negro, a physician, the "Nestor" of
his profession, having practiced in his State over thirty-five years,
said:

Sir, I can't expect my son to accept the treatment under which
I have been brought up. My length of residence here and
the number of friends whom I know of the older and more
aristocratic type of whites will protect me but as for him,
there is no friendship. Now, as for me, there is no reason why
I should leave. I am making as much money as I could anywhere
else and all of the white people respect me. But I am just one
out of a thousand. The younger men have neither my contact nor
influence.

A lawyer of remarkable talent formerly of Mississippi, now living
with his children in Chicago, who had felt keenly this humiliation and
recognized it as one of the motives behind his change of residence,
thus stated the situation:

One peculiar phase of the white southern prejudice is that
no matter how well liked or popular a colored man be in any
community, his son does not share that popularity unless he
enters a field of endeavor distinctly lower in the scale than
that occupied by his parent. My experience goes both ways on
this subject. My stepfather was a dearly beloved colored man
of the old school, but when he sent me off to Oberlin College
I returned to find that the community in which I had been
beloved as a boy in attendance at the rude country school
looked at me askance. It took twenty years to overcome the
handicap of attempting to occupy a higher sphere than that
to which the community thought it right to assign me. My
experiences were repeated by my son. He was a well liked boy
by the best people in a city of about twenty-five thousand,
because