Kenneth felt a certain doubt of Dr. Scott’s sincerity. He tried to penetrate what seemed to be a mask over the minister’s face that effectively hid all that revolved in the mind behind it. Something intangible but nevertheless real blocked his path—an unctuous affability that seemed too oily to be sincere. No, Kenneth reflected, Dr. Scott is not the man. All of this examination had taken but a few seconds, yet Kenneth’s mind was made up. In prejudging him so hastily, Kenneth did an injustice to Dr. Scott that was unconscious but real. In his heart of hearts Dr. Scott had realized that to accomplish anything at all in the South towards enlightenment he must necessarily become, at least as discretion seemed to dictate, a mental chameleon. He had suffered because of that decision, for had circumstances placed him in a more liberal and intelligent environment, he would have been far more advanced in his religious and other beliefs. The traces of gold in the ore that was his mind had been revealed in the suffering which had come to him through his speaking out against a system that seemed to him wrong.
He had been reviled, misunderstood both deliberately and by those who were not so advanced as he. He had borne in silence whatever had come to him, even threats of tarring and of death from the Ku Klux Klan, seeking a course directed by wisdom if not by valour.
While he was being introduced by Dr. Scott, Kenneth examined critically the other two men. Mr. Anthony, who had volunteered the use of his office for the conference, as no comment would be likely if the four of them were seen in the office building, was first presented.
John Anthony might well have posed as model for a typical American business man or lawyer. Of rotund figure, well-fed appearance, hair close-cut, his face clean-shaven, clad in neatly tailored but undistinguished clothing, he sat leaning slightly forward, his fingers interlocked, his thumbs and forefingers holding his cravat while his elbows rested on the arms of his chair. He acknowledged the introduction to Kenneth with a brief “Pleased t’ meetcha.” He did not rise, nor extend his hand in greeting, but he at once shrewdly appraised and catalogued Kenneth. John Anthony’s interest in interracial affairs had been first aroused by the wartime migration of Negroes to the North. His personal fortunes had been touched directly by this loss of labour, and the resultant decrease in profits had caused him to inquire into the problem of the labourers who had been always so plentiful. Like most Americans, and particularly those in Southern States, he had had no idea of, or interest in, what Negroes were forced to endure. Though near to this problem, he had been a living example of those in the proverb who “live so close to the trees, they cannot see the woods.” His inquiry, conducted with the clear-sightedness and energy he had acquired from long business training, had revealed brutalities and vicious exploitation that had amazed and sickened him. He was too shrewd to believe that Negroes would be restrained from leaving the South by attempts to picture Negroes freezing to death in the North, or to try to beguile them by transparent falsehoods to the effect that the Southern white man is the Negro’s best friend. Though he did not voice it save to his more intimate friends, he felt naught but contempt for the hypocrisy of those who too late were attempting to flatter the Negro to keep him in the South. His motives were therefore curiously mixed in his support of efforts toward interracial goodwill. Economic in part were they, because retention of Negro labour meant the continuation of his own successful business career. Equally, almost, did they proceed from a hitherto latent sense of moral indignation against the treatment which the South had accorded to Negroes in the past. Direct of speech, analytical of mind, he went straight to the heart of the problem with that same perspicacity that had won for him more than usual success in his business of conducting one of the South’s largest department stores.
Here again did Kenneth figuratively shake his head and decide that John Anthony was not destined to be the Moses of the new South. He could not for the life of him dissociate Anthony’s interest in behalf of justice from his direct financial interest in keeping Negroes in the South, where, with the inevitable working of the law of demand and supply, a surplusage of Negro labour would mean continued high profits for men like Anthony. Kenneth was too young to know that the more largely a man profits from a liberal cause, the more loyal will be his support of that cause and the lesser likelihood of his defection when difficulties arise.
Of the three men, Kenneth felt greatest hope in the third—David Gordon—younger than Kenneth, alert, capable, and with an engaging frankness of face and of manner to which Kenneth warmed instinctively. Gordon was a graduate of Harvard, where he for the first time in his life had learned to know coloured fellow-students as men and human beings instead of as “niggers.” At first he had rebelled strenuously, his every instinct had
