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78 THE ATHENAEUM RACE RELATIONS THROUGH the mists arising from the hurry and bustle of intense A modern life, and amid clouds of non-chalance and apparent in difference there may be seen, at first dimly—then brightening, an indi cator of a different day. True it is that only a begining has been made—that the major part of the work lies before us, but it is a begin ning that daily gathers momentum and rings true to the high purpose for which it was called into being. This indicator is non other than the work of the Commission on Inter-racial Co-operation and that part of the best of the Old South that has had the courage to co operate with it. To a people with so many wrongs to be righted, to whom so many doors are yet to be opened, for whom so many injustics are yet to be corrected—so many discriminations still to be removed, towards whom the attitudes of so great a number remain to be transformed, the achievements of the Commission seem relatively small- But when the consideration is made that opinions, attitudes, and modes of thinking inculcated by conditions existent for centuries require some time for mollification and final eradication, we are tempted to rejoice more than is meet for the things of significance that have been done in the year that is waning. Worthy of note have been the efforts to secure better educational facilities. North Carolina is far to the fore in her educational pro gram for Negroes with an increase in eleven years from $225,000 to $4,000,000 a year. Atlanta, after much bickering, vague promises, and a positive stand by her Negro populace, has recently completed a $1,250,000 Negro school building program, as the result of an agree ment negotiated by the local inter-racial committee. Of especial significance have been the results of the campaigns against lynching conducted by the Inter-racial Commission and the N. A. A. C. P. The number of mob murder’s fell from 58 in 1922 to 28 in 1923 and to 5 in the first six months of 1924- In Georgia alone there were 21 lynchings in 1919. Some work has been done through white and colored church groups, the Commission on Church and Race Rela tions of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and The Student Fellowship to Christianize race relations. But perhaps the most outstanding accomplishment, and certainly the most promis ing for the future, is the establishment of contacts among the col leges through conferences of professors and students of the two races and the institution of race relation classes in more than a half-hundred southern colleges.