This latter class of colored people are well-disposed towards the whites, and always willing to meet them more than halfway.  They, however, feel keenly any injustice or gross discrimination, and generally show their resentment.  The effort is sometimes made to convey the impression that the better class of colored people fight against riding in “Jim Crow” cars because they want to ride with white people or object to being with humbler members of their own race.  The truth is they object to the humiliation of being forced to ride in a particular car, aside from the fact that that car is distinctly inferior, and that they are required to pay full first-class fare.  To say that the whites are forced to ride in the superior car is less than a joke.  And, too, odd as it may sound, refined colored people get no more pleasure out of riding with offensive Negroes than anybody else would get.

I can realize more fully than I could years ago that the position of the advanced element of the colored race is often very trying.  They are the ones among the blacks who carry the entire weight of the race question; it worries the others very little, and I believe the only thing which at times sustains them is that they know that they are in the right.  On the other hand, this class of colored people get a good deal of pleasure out of life; their existence is far from being one long groan about their condition.  Out of a chaos of ignorance and poverty they have evolved a social life of which they need not be ashamed.  In cities where the professional and well-to-do class is large they have formed society—­society as discriminating as the actual conditions will allow it to be; I should say, perhaps, society possessing discriminating tendencies which become rules as fast as actual conditions allow.  This statement will, I know, sound preposterous, even ridiculous, to some persons; but as this class of colored people is the least known of the race it is not surprising.  These social circles are connected throughout the country, and a person in good standing in one city is readily accepted in another.  One who is on the outside will often find it a difficult matter to get in.  I know personally of one case in which money to the extent of thirty or forty thousand dollars and a fine house, not backed up by a good reputation, after several years of repeated effort, failed to gain entry for the possessor.  These people have their dances and dinners and card parties, their musicals, and their literary societies.  The women attend social affairs dressed in good taste, and the men in dress suits which they own; and the reader will make a mistake to confound these entertainments with the “Bellman’s Balls” and “Whitewashers’ Picnics” and “Lime-kiln Clubs” with which the humorous press of the country illustrates “Cullud Sassiety.”