A hostility, deep-seated and passionate as that which proceeds from white women as a class toward black women as a class, shoots beyond the mark and attacks indiscriminately all colored women without regard to character, without regard to standing or respectability. It is enough that they belong to the black race; ergo, they are bad, ergo, they are dangerous. All this bitter hatred of the women of one race by the women of the other race has borne bitter fruit in the South in merciless class distinctions, in hard and fast caste-lines, designed to limit contact of the races there to the single point where they come together as superior and inferior. Hence the South has its laws against intermarriage, and for separating the races in schools, in public libraries, in churches, in hotels, in cars, in waiting rooms, on steamboats, in hospitals, in poorhouses, in prisons, in graveyards. Thus it is intended to reduce the contact of the races to a minimum, to glut at the same time the hatred of the white women of the South toward the black women of the South, and to shut the men of each race from the women of the other race. But how foolish are all these laws, how futile are all these class distinctions! Do they really effect the separation of the races? They do not, they cannot under existing conditions. What then do they? They do indeed separate the world of the white man and woman from the colored man and woman, but they fail utterly to separate the world of the colored woman from the white man.
The joint fear of the white woman and the white man is incorporated today in every State of the South in laws interdicting marriage between the races. But do these laws put an end to the sexual commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? Have they checked perceptibly this vile traffic between these two worlds? They have not nor can they diminish or extinguish this evil. On the contrary, because they divide the two worlds, because they uphold this legal separation of the races, they provide a secret door, a dark way between the two worlds, between the two races, which the men of the upper world open at will and travel at pleasure. For they hold the key to this secret door, the clue to this dark way. Such preventive measures are in truth but a repetition of the fatal folly of the ostrich when it is afraid. For then while this powerful bird takes infinite pains to cover its insignificant front lines, it leaves unprotected its widely extended rear ones, and falls accordingly an easy victim to the enemy which pursues it. The real peril of an admixture of the races in the South lies not in intermarriage, but in concubinage, lies through that secret door which connects the races, the key to which is in the hands of the white men of the South. It is they who first opened it, and it is they who continue to keep it open. Were it not for the folly of the white women of the South, it might yet be closed and sealed. The folly of the white women of the South is their hatred, their fear of the colored women of the South. They first think to rid themselves of the rivalry of the second class by excluding them from the upper world, by shutting them securely within the limits of the lower one. But these women forget the existence of that secret door, of the hidden way. They forget also the hand that holds the key to the one and the clue to the other. That hand is the hand of the white man; it is certainly not the hand of the colored woman.