cation of the KuKlux Klan
that gave a malignant portrayal of the Negro and that was of such a
quality as to arouse the most intense prejudice and hatred. Within a
few months the work was put on the stage and again and again it threw
audiences into the wildest excitement. The production was to some
extent held to blame for the Atlanta Massacre. In several cities it was
proscribed. In Philadelphia on October 23, 1906, after the Negro
people had made an unavailing protest, three thousand of them made a
demonstration before the Walnut Street theater where the performance
was given, while the conduct of some within the playhouse almost
precipitated a riot; and in this city the play was suppressed the next
day. Throughout the South, however, and sometimes elsewhere it continued
to do its deadly work, and it was later to furnish the basis of "The
Birth of a Nation," an elaborate motion picture of the same general
tendency.

[Footnote 1: For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt
with in American Literature, especially fiction, note "The Negro in
American Fiction," in the _Dial_, May 11, 1916, a paper included in
_The Negro in Literature and Art_. The thesis there is that imaginative
treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types,
or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured
Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is
not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations
in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day. Since the
paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the
stories by E.K. Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.]

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of
any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever.
In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the _Atlantic_ a paper,
"The Mulatto in the Negro Problem," which contended at the same time
that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the
infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly
poisoning the mind of the Negro with "radical teachings and destructive
doctrines." These points found frequent iteration throughout the period,
and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the
_American Journal of Sociology_ in an article by Edward Byron Reuter,
"The Superiority of the Mulatto," which the next year was elabor