te of
Mississippi. The second bordered the Mississippi from Tennessee to just
above New Orleans, and extended up the Red River into Arkansas and
Texas. A third region of negro preponderance covered fifteen counties of
southern Texas.

In these tracts and elsewhere white political supremacy was maintained,
as it had been regained, by the forms of law when possible; if not, then
in some other way. The wisest negro leaders dismissed, as for the
present a dream, all thought of political as of social equality between
whites and blacks. Swarms of the colored, resigned to political
impotence, were prolific of defective, pauper, and criminal population.
Education, book-education at least, did not seem to improve them; many
believed that it positively injured them, producing cunning and vanity
rather than seriousness. This was perhaps the rule, though there were
many noble exceptions. In 1892, while the proportion of vicious negroes
seemed to be increasing in cities and large towns, it was almost to a
certainty decreasing in rural districts--improvement due in good part
to enforced temperance.

A conference on the negro and the South opened at Montgomery May 8,
1900. Many able and fair-minded men participated, representing various
attitudes, parties, and sections of the country. Limitation of the
colored franchise, the proper sort of education for negroes, the evils
of "social equality" agitation, and the causes and frequency of lynching
were the main subjects discussed. The consensus of opinion seemed to be
that for "the negro, on account of his inherent mental and emotional
instability," acquirement of the franchise should be less easy than for
whites. It was maintained that the industrially trained colored men
became leaders among their people, commanding the respect of both races
and acquiring much property, yet that ex-slaves, rather than the
younger, educated set, formed the bulk of colored property-holders.
Figures revealed among the colored population a frightful increase of
illegitimacy and of flagrant crimes. It seemed that crimes against
women, almost unknown before the war but now increasing at an alarming
rate, proceeded not from ex-slaves, but from the smart new generation.
Lynching for these offences was by some excused in that negroes would
not assist in bringing colored perpetrators to justice, and in that a
spectacular mode of punishment affected negroes more deeply than the
slow process of law, even when thi