What, pray, is engendered by all of this widespread but suppressed suffering transmitted, as a bitter heritage for generations, by Southern mothers to Southern daughters? What but bitter hatred of the black woman of the South by the white woman of the South. How is this hatred expressed? In a hundred ways and by a hundred means. One cannot keep down a feeling of pity for a large class of women in the South who cannot meet in street, or store, or car, a well-dressed and comely colored girl without experiencing a pang of suspicion, a spasm of fear. For there arises unbidden, unavoidably, in the minds of such women the ugly question, whose daughter is she, and whose mistress is she to be? For in the girl’s veins may flow the proudest blood of the South. And this possibility, aye, probability, so shameful to both races, no one in the South knows better than the Southern white woman. What happens? The most natural thing in the world, but not the wisest. The hatred, the suspicion, the fear of these women find expression in scorn, in active ill-will, not only toward that particular girl, but toward her whole class as well. They are all put under the ban of this accumulated hatred, suspicion and fear. A hostility, deep-seated and passionate as that which proceeds from white women as a class toward black women as a class, shoots beyond the mark and attacks indiscriminately all colored women without regard to character, without regard to standing or respectability. It is enough that they belong to the black race; ergo, they are bad, ergo, they are dangerous. All this bitter hatred of the women of one race by the women of the other race has borne bitter fruit in the South in merciless class distinctions, in hard and fast caste-lines, designed to limit contact of the races there to the single point where they come together as superior and inferior. Hence the South has its laws against intermarriage, and for separating the races in schools, in public libraries, in churches, in hotels, in cars, in waiting rooms, on steamboats, in hospitals, in poorhouses, in prisons, in graveyards. Thus it is intended to reduce the contact of the races to a minimum, to glut at the same time the hatred of the white women of the South toward the black women of the South, and to shut the men of each race from the women of the other race. But how foolish are all these laws, how futile are all these class distinctions! Do they really effect the separation of the races? They do not, they cannot under existing conditions. What then do they? They do indeed separate the world of the white man and woman from the colored man and woman, but they fail utterly to separate the world of the colored woman from the white man.