Race distinctions do not appear to be decreasing. On the contrary, distinctions heretofore existing only in custom tend to crystallize into law. As a matter of fact, most of the distinctions which are described above as the “Black Laws of 1865–68” are no longer in force. No State now carries statutes prescribing the hour when a Negro laborer must arise, requiring his contracts to be in writing, prohibiting him from leaving the plantation or receiving visitors without his employer’s consent, or exacting a license fee of him before he can engage in certain trades. These laws were vestiges of the slave system and survived but a short time after that system had been abolished. Likewise, those statutes which prohibited Negroes from testifying in court against white persons were repealed during the first few years after Emancipation. But distinctions which are not the direct results of slavery have found an increasing recognition in the law. Thus, though Florida, Mississippi, and Texas had separate railroad coaches for freedmen in 1866, the regular “Jim Crow” laws did not begin to creep into the statutes of the Southern States till 1881. Now every Southern State, except Missouri, has a law separating the races in railroad cars. Mississippi, in 1888, was the first State to require separate waiting-rooms. Louisiana, in 1902, took the lead in compelling separate street car accommodations, being followed by most of the Southern States within the last seven years. A similar tendency toward crystallization of race distinctions into law is found in schools. Though Massachusetts permitted separate schools as early as 1800, and though the Southern States required them from the beginning of their public school system, it is only recently that any States have seen fit to create distinctions in private schools by legislation. At present, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Tennessee prohibit the teaching of white and Negro students in the same private schools, and their action in so doing the Supreme Court of the United States in the Berea College case has decided to be constitutional. Moreover, the Japanese school question of the West has become of national concern only within the last two years. In the matter of suffrage also one observes the same general trend of practices slowly passing into statutes. Between 1877 and 1890 Negroes in the South were disfranchised to a great extent in defiance of law. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890 and ending with Georgia in 1908, seven Southern States have made constitutional provisions which, though not in letter creating race distinctions, lend themselves to race discriminations.