t blamed
the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake. It continued with
emphasis: "It is not the _Negro_ that was massacred in the Carolinas;
it was Carolina _workingmen_, Carolina _wage-slaves_ who happened to
be colored men. Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as
_workingmen_, as a branch of the _working class_, that the Negro must
denounce the Carolina felonies. Only by touching that chord can he
denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that
elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific
wrong complained of now." This point of view was destined more and more
to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted
it in its entirety or not. Another opinion, very different and also
important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of _Dixie_, a magazine
published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests. Said
he: "The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be
located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem,
for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here.... Organized labor,
as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry. The Negro stands as
a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the
South.... So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in
the drama of Southern industrial development. His good nature defies the
Socialist." At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very
next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on
fallacious assumptions.

The real climax of labor trouble as of mob violence within the period
came in Georgia and in Atlanta, a city that now assumed outstanding
importance as a battleground of the problems of the New South. In April,
1909, it happened that ten white workers on the Georgia Railroad who had
been placed on the "extra list" were replaced by Negroes at lower wages.
Against this there was violent protest all along the route. A little
more than a month later the white Firemen's Union started a strike that
was intended to be the beginning of an effort to drive all Negro firemen
from Southern roads, and it was soon apparent that the real contest was
one occasioned by the progress in the South of organized labor on the
one hand and the progress of the Negro in efficiency on the other. The
essential motives that entered into the struggle were in fact the same
as those that characterized the trouble in