I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was little of the _amour propre_ of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern riots. “We know our Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant. He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line. It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in a crowd in New York. The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed. The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro would rise. I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic” and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he. “They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”