Note 19 — PART I SOUTHWARD HO!

That excellent investigator, Mr. Stannard Baker, in his chapter on “The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” presents a good deal of conflicting evidence on this point. In the city of Montgomery, with its 35,000 inhabitants, it has been publicly stated without contradiction that 400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New Orleans Times Democrat, for instance, declares it to be a public scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”