What other explanation is rationally conceivable? If the race
problem means in the South to its white inhabitants the burden and
tragedy of having to dwell face to face with an intellectually and
morally backward people, why should not the Negro girl's triumph have
occasioned intense feeling of pleasure, rather than displeasure, by its
suggestion that her race is not intellectually hopeless?

Consider further that while no Negro, no matter what his occupation,
or personal refinement, or intellectual culture, or moral character, is
allowed to travel in a Pullman car between state lines, or to enter as
a guest a hotel patronized by white people, the blackest of Negro nurses
and valets are given food and shelter in all first-class hotels, and
occasion neither disgust, nor surprise in the Pullman cars. Here again
the heart of the race problem is laid bare. The black nurse with a white
baby in her arms, the black valet looking after the comfort of a white
invalid, have the label of their inferiority conspicuously upon them;
they understand themselves, and everybody understands them, to be
servants, enjoying certain privileges for the sake of the person served.
Almost anything, the Negro may do in the South, and anywhere he may go,
provided the manner of his doing and his doing is that of an inferior.
Such is the premium put upon his inferiority; such his inducement to
maintain it.

The point here insisted on may be made clearer, if already it is not
clear enough, by this consideration, that the man who would lose social
caste for dining with an Irish street-sweeper might be congratulated for
dining with an Irish educator; but President Roosevelt would scarcely
have given greater offense by entertaining a Negro laborer at the White
House than he gave by inviting to lunch there the Principal of Tuskegee
Institute. The race problem being what it is, the status of any Negro is
logically the status of every other. There are recognizable degrees
of inferiority among Negroes themselves; some are vastly superior to
others. But there is only one degree of inferiority separating the Negro
from the white person, attached to all Negroes alike. The logic of the
situation requires that to be any sort of black man is to be inferior to
any sort of white man; and from this logic there is no departure in the
South.

Inconsistent, perhaps, with what has been said may seem the defeat
in the Louisiana Legislature (1908) of the anti-miscegenati