Connecticut western news., 1895-10-31
THE COLORED BROTHER,

are usually somewhat interested in the color question. To a person who has never been in the South, and particular ly not to Georgia, the southern negro presents many phases you are not pre- pared for.
 It is not generally known in the North that the Georgia blacks are in the trades. All over the state the majority of the mason and carpenter work, paint ing and paper hanging is done by color ed people. A mistaken idea is that tie negroes are only found at work on the plantations and in the cotton fields, when in fact they have entered most of the trades. Many of the mail carriers in Atlanta are coiored and the work on the buildings and grounds at the Expo sition was done principally by negro labor. The blacks work very cheap. many carpenters getting only $1 day All the real mammal labor is done by the colored race. When it is remembered that the blacks outnumber the whites 5 to l in Georgia 1t is not surprising to find most of the criminals colored.. Georgia has no penit+ ntiary and the criminals are farmed out in chain gangs to contractors. Atlanta is paving her new streets by chain gang labor. the convicts wearing the striped suit and the leg chain. Georgia has the largest proportion of uneducated inhabitants of any state in the Union, due chiefly to its large population of illiterate blacks. Reading and writing is not requisite of voter but there is statute in regard to tax paying that bars hundreds of the more shiftless from voting.
 Georgia is the true Dixie and here the negro is happy. Although the color line is more strictly drawn, they seem to be far better of than in the North. The Southerner does not "hate a nigger." He simply considers him an inferior, and the people of the South are really in closer communion with the negroes than are the whites of any of the Northern states.
 It is impossible to speak of the south ern negroes in any one class. there be- ing so many different grades as we'll as shades of them. Some of them are possessed of wealth and dress in the latest fashions. Again. another class, that cannot rid themselves of the race instinct for sho oginess, are dressed ont in the gaudiest and "sportiest" of CO.'S tunes. Verify, Soloman in all his glory would have cut no ice with them. But the thing you have been looking for, the real thing, is the genuine old Dixie nlgger, distinguishable by his medly of apparel, and the little picaninnies. ditto for the lack of it. Go out in the coun- try districts of the South and you will see them. and you will enjoy it, and they will bring to your mind pleasant stories of ''the South before the War. |"
 The "bad niggers'' are largely respon- sible for the race wars that have occurr- ed in Georgia, and the negro side is not at all upheld by the peacesble and cul- tured blacks. The action, however, of a certain hot headed class of whites who indulge in the wholesale lynching pie nics cannot be too severely criticised and the hanging of half a dozen inno- cent negroes IS surely murder. even if the seventh one got his just deserts. Immortality is not at so large per cent age among the negroes as formerly, but is still in shocking condition.
 The color llne I said was more strict- ly drawn. Colored people, male and female, have to ride in the smoking car in Georgia. Nc colored person is ever preposterous enough to sit down at a table with whites, in restaurants or elsewhere. They are admitted only to a certain portion of the theatres. They have separate waiting rooms at the rail- road stations. They will not be accept ed as guests at the white hotels. And in some of the public parks in Atlanta hangs the following sign:
 "Colored people admitted only as ser vants."
 Every opportunity is given the blacks to improve, there being three splendid institutions of learning for oolored peo- pie in Atlanta, besides the colored oohoDlc all ovor tho .kaka pol;oior,rr the Georgia oolored folk are Baptist and Methodist in the largest proportion, but all the denominations have a colored following There are churches espec- ially for the blacks, and churches where the congregations are mixed, there be- ing one place where some of the whites
 will consent to sit beside ''nigger. " The mixed churches are few however, the blacks as we'll as the whites prefer ring their sepsrste institutions. As l
 have stated before, the colored people
 have made an exceedingly fine exhibit at the Exposition and were most ably
 represented there on the opening day
 by that splendid colored orator, Booker
 Washington.
 Taking every thing into consideration,
 color line and all, and after making
 comparisons between the colored man
 in the North and the South. really
 think the South is the place for the
 darkey to live and be truly happy. T. G. E. For more than a hundred years the l Shakers have been studying the reme.