And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the People's Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in Atlanta, I could not help asking myself: "What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?" For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met. "They've given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not," he said, "and now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle." _Attitude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes_ In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have long existed, many of them highly prosperous. Even before the war thousands of "free persons of colour" resided in Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860 shows a population of 3,441 "free persons of colour" in Charleston alone, of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084 free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.