After Virginia I went by rail to the neighboring State of Tennessee. I came into Knoxville one Friday night. The sight of it in the moonlight was impressive—the broad railway bridge, the clock tower with luminous face, the main street flocking with a Tennessee crowd, all shops fully ablaze with light; bunting and wreaths hung from house to house—for it was the week of the Fair. A Salvation Army meeting bellowed forth musical offerings and hallelujahs “thro’ the flag-filled air.” Everywhere electric signs were twinkling. Laughter and talk walked arm in arm along the broad main way. “It’s a fine city, this Knoxville of yours,” I ventured to remark to a stranger. “No, not a fine city,” said he, “a fine people, but not a fine city, a wretched city; it needs pulling down and rebuilding, but fine people, the finest people in the world.” This rare self-consciousness and belief in self, this group feeling, I believe, one would look in vain for in the North. “Sober Knoxville” is one of the most responsible of Southern cities. Tennessee as a whole is quiet and steady. Lynching is infrequent. It was therefore considered very extraordinary that a race riot should break out in the city. The race riots in Chicago and Washington in 1919 were no doubt worse, but none caused more perplexity than that which broke out at Knoxville on August 30th of that year. Deplorable and terrible as were those Negro _pogroms_ of the year after the war, I think they were due to special conditions. They were the expression of the frustrated ferocity that would otherwise have gone into the war. Demobilization excitements had much to do with them—the parades of Negro regiments, the idleness of white troops and of the demobilized unemployed. When the complete transition to peace conditions had been achieved, the danger of these outbreaks was averted. The year 1920 remains freer from race riots. That is not to say that they may not break out again, and on a larger scale. In any time of social upheaval and revolution they become possible. Those that have occurred show an ugly animus against the Negro still latent in the common people of the cities.