"If necessary," said Colonel McBride, "I will go out and sit on his porch with a rifle." Such was the spirit of this remarkable meeting. Mr. Hopkins proposed that the white people of the city express their deep regret for the riot and show their sympathy for the Negroes who had suffered at the hands of the mob by raising a fund of money for their assistance. Then and there $4,423 was subscribed, to which the city afterward added $1,000. But this was not all. These men, once thoroughly aroused, began looking to the future, to find some new way of preventing the recurrence of such disturbances. A committee of ten, appointed to work with the public officials in restoring order and confidence, consisted of some of the foremost citizens of Atlanta: Charles T. Hopkins, Sam D. Jones, President of the Chamber of Commerce; L. Z. Rosser, president of the Board of Education; J. W. English, president of the Fourth National Bank; Forrest Adair, a leading real estate owner; Captain W. D. Ellis, a prominent lawyer; A. B. Steele, a wealthy lumber merchant; M. L. Collier, a railroad man; John E. Murphy, capitalist; and H. Y. McCord, president of a wholesale grocery house. One of the first and most unexpected things that this committee did was to send for several of the leading Negro citizens of Atlanta: the Rev. H. H. Proctor, B. J. Davis, editor of the _Independent_, a Negro journal, the Rev. E. P. Johnson, the Rev. E. R. Carter, the Rev. J. A. Rush, and Bishop Holsey. _Committees of the Two Races Meet_ This was the first important occasion in the South upon which an attempt was made to get the two races together for any serious consideration of their differences. They held a meeting. The white men asked the Negroes, "What shall we do to relieve the irritation?" The Negroes said that they thought that coloured men were treated with unnecessary roughness on the street-cars and by the police. The white members of the committee admitted that this was so and promised to take the matter up immediately with the street-car company and the police department, which was done. The discussion was harmonious. After the meeting Mr. Hopkins said: "I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn't know that there were such Negroes in Atlanta."