“Be wise! Be discreet! Discuss this with no one! Fail not!
There was a plain card enclosed, also of cheap and easily obtained quality, on which was typed a date, time, and place. …
Mirabile dictu, each of the fifteen recipients of this cryptic missive was a Ku Klux Klansman. …
XIX
Mrs. Tucker was operated on at Atlanta on Thursday morning at the Auburn Infirmary, owned and conducted by a group of coloured physicians of that city, as none of them could operate in the white hospitals. Kenneth keenly enjoyed being in a hospital again, with all its conveniences. The operation finished and Mrs. Tucker resting easily, he purchased, after much picking and choosing, Jane’s engagement ring—a beautiful, blue-white diamond solitaire.
That important task performed, he telephoned Dr. Scott, to whom Judge Stevenson had given him a letter of introduction. So engrossed had he been in the operation and the purchasing of the ring, he had almost forgotten the promise made to the judge to see and talk with Dr. Scott, known to be a liberal leader of Southern public opinion and one deeply concerned with the problem of race relations.
“That’s a mighty intelligent plan you’ve worked out,” Dr. Scott boomed over the wire. “I’d like to have you talk that over with me and one or two others here. Can you do it before going home?”
Kenneth told him he had to leave early next morning for Central City. As Dr. Scott had a meeting that would keep him engaged all afternoon, it was decided that they should meet that evening at an office in a building downtown in the business section.
It was with a deal of eagerness—and with some degree of anxiety, for he did not know how he would be received by Dr. Scott and the others—that Kenneth set forth that evening for the meeting. He found three men awaiting him in the office of John Anthony, who was one of the three. His footsteps echoed in ghostlike fashion as he walked down the hallway of the deserted building. From the open window there floated from the street below the subdued clatter of automobiles, the cries of newsboys, the restless shuffling of the leisurely crowd as it moved up and down Peachtree Street. Kenneth sought to weigh the three, who were, he felt, representatives of that “new South” of which so much was heard, but signs of whose activities he had so seldom seen. He was seeking to find out their motives, their plans of accomplishing that spirit of fair play toward the Negro, to determine how far they would go towards challenging the established order that was damning the South intellectually, morally, economically. Kenneth, with too-high ideals for his environment, was almost naive in his eager search for the great champion he had dreamed of who would brave danger and contumely and even death itself for a newer and brighter day for his people in the South. That hope had been dulled somewhat by the things he had seen since his return to Central City, for he was not of an unreflective mind. Yet he had not seen far enough beneath the surface of that volcano of passion and hate and greed which is the South to realize that the South had never produced a martyr to any great moral cause one who had possessed sufficient courage to oppose, regardless of consequences, any one of the set, dogmatic beliefs of the South. True it was that there were some who had fought in the Civil War with firm belief that the South was right—even though it had been shown that their idealism was a perverted one. But even then these had moved with the tide of sectional sentiment and not against it.
Educated in Southern schools where the textbooks of history always exalted the leaders of the Confederacy, raising Lee and Jackson and Johnston and Gordon to heights but little lower than the heroes of Grecian mythology, and ever tending to disparage and revile the Union cause and its leaders, Kenneth, like many coloured youths, had accepted the readymade and fallacious estimates set before him. It was, therefore, but natural that he set his hopes for stalwart, unafraid leadership too high and, at the same time, failed to realize that the South had never begotten an Abraham Lincoln, a Garrison, a Sumner, or even a meteor-like John Brown, bursting into brilliance born of indignation against stupidity or ignorance or wrong and dying gloriously for that cause. Kenneth’s eyes had partially been opened by his memorable talk with Judge Stevenson. Etched upon his mind by the acid of bitter truths were the judge’s words that the boasted Anglo-Saxonism of the South had curdled into moral cowardice on all subjects by the repression incident to the race problem. Nevertheless Kenneth was too inexperienced as yet in the ways of life to comprehend the full import of the older man’s cynicism. He yet sought him who would fulfil his ideal of a great leader who, like a latter-day Crusader, would guide white and black together out of the impasse in which the South seemed to be. Kenneth thus anxiously examined the three before him to see if by chance any one of them bore the accolade which would stamp him the Moses that he sought.
Naturally enough, his eyes first went to Dr. Scott, as it was of him that Judge Stevenson had spoken most favourably. Minister to one of the larger Atlanta churches, he had spoken frequently and with considerable vigour for Georgia in behalf of greater kindness and fairness toward the Negro. He was very tall. His more than ordinary height with his attenuated and lanky slenderness gave him an almost cadaverous
