e two decades that we are now to consider we find the working
out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a
generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in
control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a
broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the
Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be
fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic
antagonism.

All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the
prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of
the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source
may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during
the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary
that he be without the protection of political power and that he be
denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly
socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed
everywhere--in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the
facilities of city life--the idea of inferior service for Negroes;
and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness.
Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the
sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the
question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead
days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the
Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that
from childhood to manhood--in education, in economic chance, in legal
power--they had by their own system deprived a human being of every
privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they
stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they
blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared,
and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give
him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the
business of the police.

It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that
characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those
Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man,
and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before
the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race
but als