The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher

Upstairs in the box of J. Pennington Potter, who was one of the dozen vice-presidents of the General Improvement Association, an incredibly ill-chosen variety of personalities squirmed. It was J. Pennington Potter's conviction that only admixture produced harmony between races. He argued quite logically. Prejudice and misunderstanding were due to mutual ignorance and ignorance due to silence. This silence must be broken. How break it save by acquaintanceship -- how acquaint save by admixture? Social admixture -- there was the solution to all the problems of race.

And so he proceeded to admix. There was himself, proud, loud, and pompous, and his wife, round, brown, and expansile, who always seemed bursting with something to say, but had never been known to say it; a woman so inflated with her husband's bombast that one felt she'd collapse at a single thrust. There was the Hon. Buckram Byle, an ex-alderman from the twenty-ninth district, whose presence was intended to give the party some notion of the dignity of a Negro public servant. This he assuredly did, his habit being to stand apart, alone, with folded arms, motionless, silent, scowling, in the deeps of meditation. But few suspected the real basis of this air: that Mr. Byle was simply very angry at his young and pretty wife, Nora, who had managed to elude his jealously watchful eye all evening; and that the scowl, as usual, evidenced his resolution to take her straight home the moment she should reappear. There was Noel Dunn, the Nordic editor of an anti-Nordic journal, who missed no item of scene or conversation that he thought he could use for copy. Dunn's readers gobbled up pro-Negro pieces, not because they were pro-Negro so much as because they were anti-White, and he and Mrs. Dunn were frequent visitors to Harlem, finding the Pennington Potters convenient wedges in effecting several profitable entrances.