or university sense. A flagrant instance of injustice is the
enactment in Kentucky of a law prohibiting all co-education of the
races--a law especially designed to cripple the admirable work of Berea
College.

But the most serious obstacle to the black man, the country over, is the
threatened narrowing of his industrial opportunities. Here has been his
vantage-ground at the South, because his productive power was so
great--by numbers and by his inherited and traditional skill,--that
there was no choice but to employ him. At the North, where he is in so
small a minority as to be unimportant, he has been crowded into an ever
narrowing circle of employments. Precisely the same sentiment, though
not so ingeniously formulated, which makes the white gentleman refuse to
receive the black gentleman in his drawing-room, inclines the white
carpenter or mason to refuse to work alongside of his negro
fellow-laborer. Yet against this we have the accomplished fact, in the
South, of black and white laborers actually working together,
harmoniously and successfully, in most industries. We see the divided
and wavering attitude of the trade-unions; some branches taking whites
and blacks into the same society; others allying white societies and
black societies on an equal footing; others refusing all affiliation;
the earlier declarations of the national leaders for the broadest human
fellowship challenged and often giving way before the imperious
assertions of the caste spirit.

A race closely intermixed with another superior to it in numbers,
wealth, and intelligence,--a self-conscious and self-assertive
race,--suffers at many points. There are abuses tolerated by law;
infractions and evasions of law; semi-slavery under the name of peonage;
impositions by the landlord and the creditor. There are unpunished
outrages,--let one typical case suffice: a negro farmer and produce
dealer, respected and esteemed by all, in place of a rude shanty puts up
a good building for his wares; the word goes round among the roughs,
"that nigger is getting too biggity," and his store is burned,--nobody
surprised and nobody punished. Then there is the chapter of lynchings:
First, the gross crime of some human brute, then a sudden passionate
vengeance by the community; the custom spreads; it runs into hideous
torture and public exultation in it; it extends to other crimes; it
knows no geographical boundaries but spreads like an evil infection over
the countr