more thoughtful men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro-American to the common brotherhood of humanity. But they did not.
As Peter sat staring into the darkness the whole effect of the dehumanizing of the black folk of the South began to unfold itself before his imagination. It explained to him the tragedies of his race, their sufferings at the hand of mob violence; the casualness, even the levity with which black men were murdered: the chronic dishonesty with which negroes were treated: the constant enactment of adverse legislation against them; the cynical use of negro women. They were all vermin, animals; they were one with the sheep and the swine; a little nearer the human in form, perhaps, and, oddly enough, one that could be bred to a human being, as testified a multitude of brown and yellow and cream-colored folk, but all marching away, as the Captain had so passionately said, marching away, their forms hidden from human intercourse under a shroud of black, an endless procession marching away, God knew whither! And yet they were the South's own flesh and blood.
The horror of such a complex swelled in Peter's mind to monstrous proportions. As night thickened at his window, the negro sat dazed and wondering at the mightiness of his vision. His thoughts went groping, trying to solve some obscure problem it posed. He thought of the Arkwright boy; he thought of the white men smiling as his mother's funeral went past the
