ociety.

One of the effects of the mobilization of the Negro has been to bring
him into closer and more intimate contact with his own people. Common
interests have drawn the blacks together, and caste sentiment has kept
the black and white apart. The segregation of the races, which began as
a spontaneous movement on the part of both, has been fostered by the
policy of the dominant race. The agitation of the Reconstruction period
made the division between the races in politics absolute. Segregation
and separation in other matters have gone on steadily ever since. The
Negro at the present time has separate churches, schools, libraries,
hospitals, Y.M.C.A. associations, and even separate towns. There are,
perhaps, a half-dozen communities in the United States, every inhabitant
of which is a Negro. Most of these so-called Negro towns are suburban
villages; two of them, at any rate, are the centers of a considerable
Negro farming population. In general it may be said that where the Negro
schools, churches, and Y.M.C.A. associations are not separate they do
not exist.

It is hard to estimate the ultimate effect of this isolation of the
black man. One of the most important effects has been to establish a
common interest among all the different colors and classes of the race.
This sense of solidarity has grown up gradually with the organization of
the Negro people. It is stronger in the South, where segregation is more
complete, than it is in the North where, twenty years ago, it would have
been safe to say it did not exist. Gradually, imperceptibly, within the
larger world of the white man, a smaller world, the world of the black
man, is silently taking form and shape.

Every advance in education and intelligence puts the Negro in possession
of the technique of communication and organization of the white man, and
so contributes to the extension and consolidation of the Negro world
within the white.

The motive for this increasing solidarity is furnished by the increasing
pressure, or perhaps I should say by the increasing sensibility of
Negroes to the pressure and the prejudice without. The sentiment of
racial loyalty, which is a comparatively recent manifestation of the
growing self-consciousness of the race, must be regarded as a response
and "accommodation" to changing internal and external relations of the
race. The sentiment which Negroes are beginning to call "race pride"
does not exist to the same extent in the Nort