d on, loyally and at heavy cost, by the succeeding Democratic
governments. The figures show a great advance from 1875 to 1880 in the
number of schools and scholars of both races throughout the South.
Political inferiority for the negroes, but civil rights, industrial
freedom, and rudimentary education,--that was the theory and largely the
practice of their white neighbors.

One clause they added with emphatic affirmation: "I will buy with you,
sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I
will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." Social
superiority, indicated by separation in all the familiar and courteous
intercourse of daily life, was asserted by the whites with a rigor
beyond that of the days of slavery. When humiliated and stung by the
political ascendency of their former bondmen, they wrapped themselves in
their social superiority with a new haughtiness. The pride of race, of
color, of the owner above the serf, stripped of its old power and
insignia, but no whit weakened in root and core, set an adamantine wall
along the line of social familiarity. Let the black man have his own
place--in school and church, in street and market and hotel; but the
same place, never! Separate schools, churches, cars. And as in a
hospitable country the social meal is the special occasion and symbol of
good fellowship and equal comradeship, right there let the line be
fixed,--no black man or woman shall sit at table with whites.

The usage came down by tradition, and became only a little more rigid
under the new conditions. At the North the general practice had always
been much the same; but there it was occasionally and growingly
superseded, when people of the two races found a common level of
education and manners. The Southern whites for a while took their own
practice as a matter of course. But then, especially as by degrees some
black men and women acquired mental cultivation and social polish,--then
came question and challenge from the world without and from conscience
within; why this rigid separation? An answer must be found or made,--and
presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and
drink together, play and work together,--then they will intermarry, and
the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the
conviction, the creed, the shibboleth, of the Southern whites,--race
purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social
intimacy,