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While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Within the last two years there has been a
steady stream of Negroes into the North in such large
numbers as to overshadow in its results all other movements
of the kind in the United States. These Negroes have come
largely from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Virginia,
North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, Arkansas and
Mississippi. The given causes of this migration are numerous
and complicated. Some untruths centering around this exodus
have not been unlike those of other migrations. Again we
hear that the Negroes are being brought North to fight
organized labor,1 and to carry
doubtful States for the Republicans.2
These numerous explanations themselves, however, give rise
to doubt as to the fundamental cause.
Why then should the Negroes leave the South? It has often
been spoken of as the best place for them. There, it is
said, they have made unusual strides forward. The progress
of the Negroes in the South, however, has in no sense been
general, although the land owned by Negroes in the country
and the property of thrifty persons of their race in urban
communities may be extensive. In most parts of the South the
Negroes are still unable to become landowners or successful
business men. Conditions and customs have reserved these
spheres for the whites. Generally speaking, the Negroes are
still dependent on the white people for food and shelter.
Although not exactly slaves, they are yet attached to the
white people as tenants, servants or dependents. Accepting
this as their lot, they have been content to wear their
lord's cast off clothing, and live in his ramshackled barn
or cellar. In this unhappy state so many have settled down,
losing all ambition to attain a higher station. The world
has gone on but in their sequestered sphere progress has
passed them by.
What then is the cause? There have been "bulldozing",
terrorism, maltreatment and what not of persecution; but the
Negroes have not in large numbers wandered away from the
land of their birth. What the migrants themselves think
about it, goes to the very heart of the trouble. Some say
that they left the South on account of injustice in the
courts, unrest, lack of privileges, denial of the right to
vote, bad treatment, oppression, segregation or lynching.
Others say that they left to find employment, to secure
better wages, better school facilities, and better
opportunities to toil upward.3
Southern white newspapers unaccustomed to give the Negroes
any mention but that of criminals have said that the Negroes
are going North because they have not had a fair chance in
the South and that if they are to be retained there, the
attitude of the whites toward them must be changed.
Professor William O. Scroggs, of Louisiana State University,
considers as causes of this exodus "the relatively low wages
paid farm labor, an unsatisfactory tenant or crop-sharing
system, the boll weevil, the crop failure of 1916, lynching,
disfranchisement, segregation, poor schools, and the
monotony, isolation and drudgery of farm life." Professor
Scroggs, however, is wrong in thinking that the persecution
of the blacks has little to do with the migration for the
reason that during these years when the treatment of the
Negroes is decidedly better they are leaving the South. This
does not mean that they would not have left before, if they
had had economic opportunities in the North. It is highly
probable that the Negroes would not be leaving the South
today, if they were treated as men, although there might be
numerous opportunities for economic improvement in the
North.4
The immediate cause of this movement was the suffering due
to the floods aggravated by the depredations of the boll
weevil. Although generally mindful of our welfare, the
United States Government has not been as ready to build
levees against a natural enemy to property as it has been to
provide fortifications for warfare. It has been necessary
for local communities and State governments to tax
themselves to maintain them. The national government,
however, has appropriated to the purpose of facilitating
inland navigation certain sums which have been used in doing
this work, especially in the Mississippi Valley. There are
now 1,538 miles of levees on both sides of the Mississippi
from Cape Girardeau to the passes. These levees, of course,
are still inadequate to the security of the planters against
these inundations. Carrying 406 million tons of mud a year,
the river becomes a dangerous stream subject to change,
abandoning its old bed to cut for itself a new channel,
transferring property from one State to another, isolating
cities and leaving once useful levees marooned in the
landscape like old Indian mounds or overgrown intrenchments.5
This valley has, therefore, been frequently visited with
disasters which have often set the population in motion. The
first disastrous floods came in 1858 and 1859, breaking many
of the levees, the destruction of which was practically
completed by the floods of 1865 and 1869. There is an annual
rise in the stream, but since 1874 this river system has
fourteen times devastated large areas of this section with
destructive floods. The property in this district
depreciated in value to the extent of about 400 millions in
ten years. Farmers from this section, therefore, have at
times moved west with foreigners to take up public lands.
The other disturbing factor in this situation was the boll
weevil, an interloper from Mexico in 1892. The boll weevil
is an insect about one fourth of an inch in length, varying
from one eighth to one third of an inch with a breadth of
about one third of the length. When it first emerges it is
yellowish, then becomes grayish brown and finally assumes a
black shade. It breeds on no other plant than cotton and
feeds on the boll. This little animal, at first attacked the
cotton crop in Texas. It was not thought that it would
extend its work into the heart of the South so as to become
of national consequence, but it has, at the rate of forty to
one hundred sixty miles annually, invaded all of the cotton
district except that of the Carolinas and Virginia. The
damage it does, varies according to the rainfall and the
harshness of the winter, increasing with the former and
decreasing with the latter. At times the damage has been to
the extent of a loss of 50 per cent. of the crop, estimated
at 400,000 bales of cotton annually, about 4,500,000 bales
since the invasion or $250,000,000 worth of cotton.6
The output of the South being thus cut off, the planter has
less income to provide supplies for his black tenants and,
the prospects for future production being dark, merchants
accustomed to give them credit have to refuse. This, of
course, means financial depression, for the South is a
borrowing section and any limitation to credit there blocks
the wheels of industry. It was fortunate for the Negro
laborers in this district that there was then a demand for
labor in the North when this condition began to obtain.
This demand was made possible by the cutting off of European
immigration by the World War, which thereby rendered this
hitherto uncongenial section an inviting field for the
Negro. The Negroes have made some progress in the North
during the last fifty years, but despite their achievements
they have been so handicapped by race prejudice and
proscribed by trades unions that the uplift of the race by
economic methods has been impossible. The European
immigrants have hitherto excluded the Negroes even from the
menial positions. In the midst of the drudgery left for
them, the blacks have often heretofore been debased to the
status of dependents and paupers. Scattered through the
North too in such small numbers, they have been unable to
unite for social betterment and mutual improvement and
naturally too weak to force the community to respect their
wishes as could be done by a large group with some political
or economic power. At present, however, Negro laborers, who
once went from city to city, seeking such employment as
trades unions left to them, can work even as skilled
laborers throughout the North.7
Women of color formerly excluded from domestic service by
foreign maids are now in demand. Many mills and factories
which Negroes were prohibited from entering a few years ago
are now bidding for their labor. Railroads cannot find help
to keep their property in repair, contractors fall short of
their plans for failure to hold mechanics drawn into the
industrial boom and the United States Government has had to
advertise for men to hasten the preparation for war.
Men from afar went south to tell the Negroes of a way of
escape to a more congenial place. Blacks long since
unaccustomed to venture a few miles from home, at once had
visions of a promised land just a few hundred miles away.
Some were told of the chance to amass fabulous riches, some
of the opportunities for education and some of the
hospitality of the places of amusement and recreation in the
North. The migrants then were soon on the way. Railway
stations became conspicuous with the presence of Negro
tourists, the trains were crowded to full capacity and the
streets of northern cities were soon congested with black
laborers seeking to realize their dreams in the land of
unusual opportunity.
Employment agencies, recently multiplied to meet the demand
for labor, find themselves unable to cope with the situation
and agents sent into the South to induce the blacks by
offers of free transportation and high wages to go north,
have found it impossible to supply the demand in centers
where once toiled the Poles, Italians and the Greeks
formerly preferred to the Negroes.8
In other words, the present migration differs from others in
that the Negro has opportunity awaiting him in the North
whereas formerly it was necessary for him to make a place
for himself upon arriving among enemies. The proportion of
those returning to the South, therefore, will be
inconsiderable.
Becoming alarmed at the immensity of this movement the South
has undertaken to check it. To frighten Negroes from the
North southern newspapers are carefully circulating reports
that many of them are returning to their native land because
of unexpected hardships.9 But
having failed in this, southerners have compelled employment
agents to cease operations there, arrested suspected
employers and, to prevent the departure of the Negroes,
imprisoned on false charges those who appear at stations to
leave for the North. This procedure could not long be
effective, for by the more legal and clandestine methods of
railway passenger agents the work has gone forward. Some
southern communities have, therefore, advocated drastic
legislation against labor agents, as was suggested in
Louisiana in 1914, when by operation of the Underwood Tariff
Law the Negroes thrown out of employment in the sugar
district migrated to the cotton plantations.10
One should not, however, get the impression that the
majority of the Negroes are leaving the South. Eager as
these Negroes seem to go, there is no unanimity of opinion
as to whether migration is the best policy. The sycophant,
toady class of Negroes naturally advise the blacks to remain
in the South to serve their white neighbors. The radical
protagonists of the equal-rights-for-all element urge them
to come North by all means. Then there are the thinking
Negroes, who are still further divided. Both divisions of
this element have the interests of the race at heart, but
they are unable to agree as to exactly what the blacks
should now do. Thinking that the present war will soon be
over and that consequently the immigration of foreigners
into this country will again set in and force out of
employment thousands of Negroes who have migrated to the
North, some of the most representative Negroes are advising
their fellows to remain where they are. The most serious
objection to this transplantation is that it means for the
Negroes a loss of land, the rapid acquisition of which has
long been pointed to as the best evidence of the ability of
the blacks to rise in the economic world. So many Negroes
who have by dint of energy purchased small farms yielding an
increasing income from year to year, are now disposing of
them at nominal prices to come north to work for wages.
Looking beyond the war, however, and thinking too that the
depopulation of Europe during this upheaval will render
immigration from that quarter for some years an
impossibility, other thinkers urge the Negroes to continue
the migration to the North, where the race may be found in
sufficiently large numbers to wield economic and political
power.
Great as is the dearth of labor in the South, moreover, the
Negro exodus has not as yet caused such a depression as to
unite the whites in inducing the blacks to remain in that
section. In the first place, the South has not yet felt the
worst effects of this economic upheaval as that part of the
country has been unusually aided by the millions which the
United States Government is daily spending there.
Furthermore, the poor whites are anxious to see the exodus
of their competitors in the field of labor. This leaves the
capitalists at their mercy, and in keeping with their
domineering attitude, they will be able to handle the labor
situation as they desire. As an evidence of this fact we
need but note the continuation of mob rule and lynching in
the South despite the preachings against it of the organs of
thought which heretofore winked at it. This terrorism has
gone to an unexpected extent. Negro farmers have been
threatened with bodily injury, unless they leave certain
parts.
The southerner of aristocratic bearing will say that only
the shiftless poor whites terrorize the Negroes. This may be
so, but the truth offers little consolation when we observe
that most white people in the South are of this class; and
the tendency of this element to put their children to work
before they secure much education does not indicate that the
South will soon experience that general enlightenment
necessary to exterminate these survivals of barbarism.
Unless the upper classes of the whites can bring the mob
around to their way of thinking that the persecution of the
Negro is prejudicial to the interests of all, it is not
likely that mob rule will soon cease and the migration to
this extent will be promoted rather than retarded.
It is unfortunate for the South that the growing
consciousness of the Negroes has culminated at the very time
they are most needed. Finally heeding the advice of
agricultural experts to reconstruct its agricultural system,
the South has learned in the school of bitter experience to
depart from the plan of producing the single cotton crop. It
is now raising food stuffs to make that section self
supporting without reducing the usual output of cotton. With
the increasing production in the South, therefore, more
labor is needed just at the very time it is being drawn to
centers in the North. The North being an industrial and
commercial section has usually attracted the immigrants, who
will never fit into the economic situation in the South
because they will not accept the treatment given Negroes.
The South, therefore, is now losing the only labor which it
can ever use under present conditions.
Where these Negroes are going is still more interesting. The
exodus to the west was mainly directed to Kansas and
neighboring States, the migration to the Southwest centered
in Oklahoma and Texas, pioneering Negro laborers drifted
into the industrial district of the Appalachian highland
during the eighties and nineties and the infiltration of the
discontented talented tenth affected largely the cities of
the North. But now we are told that at the very time the
mining districts of the North and West are being filled with
blacks the western planters are supplying their farms with
them and that into some cities have gone sufficient skilled
and unskilled Negro workers to increase the black population
more than one hundred per cent. Places in the North, where
the black population has not only not increased but even
decreased in recent years, are now receiving a steady influx
of Negroes. In fact, this is a nation-wide migration
affecting all parts and all conditions.
Students of social problems are now wondering whether the
Negro can be adjusted in the North. Many perplexing problems
must arise. This movement will produce results not unlike
those already mentioned in the discussion of other
migrations, some of which we have evidence of today. There
will be an increase in race prejudice leading in some
communities to actual outbreaks as in Chester and Youngstown
and probably to massacres like that of East St. Louis, in
which participated not only well known citizens but the
local officers and the State militia. The Negroes in the
North are in competition with white men who consider them
not only strike breakers but a sort of inferior individuals
unworthy of the consideration which white men deserve. And
this condition obtains even where Negroes have been admitted
to the trades unions.
Negroes in seeking new homes in the North, moreover, invade
residential districts hitherto exclusively white. There they
encounter prejudice and persecution until most whites thus
disturbed move out determined to do whatever they can to
prevent their race from suffering from further depreciation
of property and the disturbance of their community life.
Lawlessness has followed, showing that violence may under
certain conditions develop among some classes anywhere
rather than reserve itself for vigilance committees of
primitive communities. It has brought out too another aspect
of lawlessness in that it breaks out in the North where the
numbers of Negroes are still too small to serve as an excuse
for the terrorism and lynching considered necessary in the
South to keep the Negroes down.
The maltreatment of the Negroes will be nationalized by this
exodus. The poor whites of both sections will strike at this
race long stigmatized by servitude but now demanding
economic equality. Race prejudice, the fatal weakness of the
Americans, will not so soon abate although there will be
advocates of fraternity, equality and liberty required to
reconstruct our government and rebuild our civilization in
conformity with the demands of modern efficiency by placing
every man regardless of his color wherever he may do the
greatest good for the greatest number.
The Negroes, however, are doubtless going to the North in
sufficiently large numbers to make themselves felt. If this
migration falls short of establishing in that section Negro
colonies large enough to wield economic and political power,
their state in the end will not be any better than that of
the Negroes already there. It is to these large numbers
alone that we must look for an agent to counteract the
development of race feeling into riots. In large numbers the
blacks will be able to strike for better wages or
concessions due a rising laboring class and they will have
enough votes to defeat for reelection those officers who
wink at mob violence or treat Negroes as persons beyond the
pale of the law.
The Negroes in the North, however, will get little out of
the harvest if, like the blacks of Reconstruction days, they
unwisely concentrate their efforts on solving all of their
problems by electing men of their race as local officers or
by sending a few members even to Congress as is likely in
New York, Philadelphia and Chicago within the next
generation. The Negroes have had representatives in Congress
before but they were put out because their constituency was
uneconomic and politically impossible. There was nothing but
the mere letter of the law behind the Reconstruction Negro
officeholder and the thus forced political recognition
against public opinion could not last any longer than
natural forces for some time thrown out of gear by unnatural
causes could resume the usual line of procedure.
It would be of no advantage to the Negro race today to send
to Congress forty Negro Representatives on the pro rata
basis of numbers, especially if they happened not to be
exceptionally well qualified. They would remain in Congress
only so long as the American white people could devise some
plan for eliminating them as they did during the
Reconstruction period. Near as the world has approached real
democracy, history gives no record of a permanent government
conducted on this basis. Interests have always been stronger
than numbers. The Negroes in the North, therefore, should
not on the eve of the economic revolution follow the advice
of their misguided and misleading race leaders who are
diverting their attention from their actual welfare to a
specialization in politics. To concentrate their efforts on
electing a few Negroes to office wherever the blacks are
found in the majority, would exhibit the narrowness of their
oppressors. It would be as unwise as the policy of the
Republican party of setting aside a few insignificant
positions like that of Recorder of Deeds, Register of the
Treasury and Auditor of the Navy as segregated jobs for
Negroes. Such positions have furnished a nucleus for the
large, worthless, office seeking class of Negroes in
Washington, who have established the going of the people of
the city toward pretence and sham.
The Negroes should support representative men of any color
or party, if they stand for a square deal and equal rights
for all. The new Negroes in the North, therefore, will, as
so many of their race in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago
are now doing, ally themselves with those men who are
fairminded and considerate of the man far down, and seek to
embrace their many opportunities for economic progress, a
foundation for political recognition, upon which the race
must learn to build. Every race in the universe must aspire
to becoming a factor in politics; but history shows that
there is no short route to such success. Like other despised
races beset with the prejudice and militant opposition of
self-styled superiors, the Negroes must increase their
industrial efficiency, improve their opportunities to make a
living, develop the home, church and school, and contribute
to art, literature, science and philosophy to clear the way
to that political freedom of which they cannot be deprived.
The entire country will be benefited by this upheaval. It
will be helpful even to the South. The decrease in the black
population in those communities where the Negroes outnumber
the whites will remove the fear of "Negro domination", one
of the causes of the backwardness of the South and its
peculiar civilization. Many of the expensive precautions
which the southern people have taken to keep the Negroes
down, much of the terrorism incited to restrain the blacks
from self assertion will no longer be considered necessary;
for, having the excess in numbers on their side, the whites
will finally rest assured that the Negroes may be encouraged
without any apprehension that they may develop enough power
to subjugate or embarrass their former masters.
The Negroes too are very much in demand in the South and the
intelligent whites will gladly give them larger
opportunities to attach them to that section, knowing that
the blacks, once conscious of their power to move freely
throughout the country wherever they may improve their
condition, will never endure hardships like those formerly
inflicted upon the race. The South is already learning that
the Negro is the most desirable laborer for that section,
that the persecution of Negroes not only drives them out but
makes the employment of labor such a problem that the South
will not be an attractive section for capital. It will,
therefore, be considered the duty of business men to secure
protection to the Negroes lest their ill treatment force
them to migrate to the extent of bringing about a stagnation
of their business.
The exodus has driven home the truth that the prosperity of
the South is at the mercy of the Negro. Dependent on cheap
labor, which the bulldozing whites will not readily furnish,
the wealthy southerners must finally reach the position of
regarding themselves and the Negroes as having a community
of interests which each must promote. "Nature itself in
those States," Douglass said, "came to the rescue of the
Negro. He had labor, the South wanted it, and must have it
or perish. Since he was free he could then give it, or
withhold it; use it where he was, or take it elsewhere, as
he pleased. His labor made him a slave and his labor could,
if he would, make him free, comfortable and independent. It
is more to him than either fire, sword, ballot boxes or
bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its
pocket."11 Knowing that the
Negro has this silent weapon to be used against his employer
or the community, the South is already giving the race
better educational facilities, better railway
accommodations, and will eventually, if the advocacy of
certain southern newspapers be heeded, grant them political
privileges. Wages in the South, therefore, have risen even
in the extreme southwestern States, where there is an
opportunity to import Mexican labor. Reduced to this
extremity, the southern aristocrats have begun to lose some
of their race prejudice, which has not hitherto yielded to
reason or philanthropy.
Southern men are telling their neighbors that their section
must abandon the policy of treating the Negroes as a problem
and construct a program for recognition rather than for
repression. Meetings are, therefore, being held to find out
what the Negro wants and what may be done to keep them
contented. They are told that the Negro must be elevated not
exploited, that to make the South what it must needs be, the
cooperation of all is needed to train and equip the men of
all races for efficiency. The aim of all then must be to
reform or get rid of the unfair proprietors who do not give
their tenants a fair division of the returns from their
labor. To this end the best whites and blacks are urged to
come together to find a working basis for a systematic
effort in the interest of all.
To say that either the North or the South can easily become
adjusted to this change is entirely too sanguine. The North
will have a problem. The Negroes in the northern city will
have much more to contend with than when settled in the
rural districts or small urban centers. Forced by
restrictions of real estate men into congested districts,
there has appeared the tendency toward further segregation.
They are denied social contact, are sagaciously separated
from the whites in public places of amusement and are
clandestinely segregated in public schools in spite of the
law to the contrary. As a consequence the Negro migrant
often finds himself with less friends than he formerly had.
The northern man who once denounced the South on account of
its maltreatment of the blacks gradually grows silent when a
Negro is brought next door. There comes with the movement,
therefore, the difficult problem of housing.
Where then must the migrants go? They are not wanted by the
whites and are treated with contempt by the native blacks of
the northern cities, who consider their brethren from the
South too criminal and too vicious to be tolerated. In the
average progressive city there has heretofore been a certain
increase in the number of houses through natural growth, but
owing to the high cost of materials, high wages, increasing
taxation and the inclination to invest money in enterprises
growing out of the war, fewer houses are now being built,
although Negroes are pouring into these centers as a steady
stream. The usual Negro quarters in northern centers of this
sort have been filled up and the overflow of the black
population scattered throughout the city among white people.
Old warehouses, store rooms, churches, railroad cars and
tents have been used to meet these demands.
A large per cent of these Negroes are located in rooming
houses or tenements for several families. The majority of
them cannot find individual rooms. Many are crowded into the
same room, therefore, and too many into the same bed.
Sometimes as many as four and five sleep in one bed, and
that may be placed in the basement, dining-room or kitchen
where there is neither adequate light nor air. In some cases
men who work during the night sleep by day in beds used by
others during the night. Some of their houses have no water
inside and have toilets on the outside without sewerage
connections. The cooking is often done by coal or wood
stoves or kerosene lamps. Yet the rent runs high although
the houses are generally out of repair and in some cases
have been condemned by the municipality. The unsanitary
conditions in which many of the blacks are compelled to live
are in violation of municipal ordinances.
Furthermore, because of the indiscriminate employment by
labor agents and the dearth of labor requiring the
acceptance of almost all sorts of men, some disorderly and
worthless Negroes have been brought into the North. On the
whole, however, these migrants are not lazy, shiftless and
desperate as some predicted that they would be. They
generally attend church, save their money and send a part of
their savings regularly to their families. They do not
belong to the class going North in quest of whiskey. Mr.
Abraham Epstein, who has written a valuable pamphlet setting
forth his researches in Pittsburgh, states that the migrants
of that city do not generally imbibe and most of those who
do, take beer only.12 Out of
four hundred and seventy persons to whom he propounded this
question, two hundred and ten or forty-four per cent of them
were total abstainers. Seventy per cent of those having
families do not drink at all.
With this congestion, however, have come serious
difficulties. Crowded conditions give rise to vice, crime
and disease. The prevalence of vice has not been the rule
but tendencies, which better conditions in the South
restrained from developing, have under these undesirable
conditions been given an opportunity to grow. There is,
therefore, a tendency toward the crowding of dives,
assembling on the corners of streets and the commission of
petty offences which crowd them into the police courts. One
finds also sometimes a congestion in houses of dissipation
and the carrying of concealed weapons. Law abiding on the
whole, however, they have not experienced a wave of crime.
The chief offences are those resulting from the saloons and
denizens of vice, which are furnished by the community
itself.
Disease has been one of their worst enemies, but reports on
their health have been exaggerated. On account of this
sudden change of the Negroes from one climate to another and
the hardships of more unrelenting toil, many of them have
been unable to resist pneumonia, bronchitis and
tuberculosis. Churches, rescue missions and the National
League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes have offered relief
in some of these cases. The last-named organization is
serving in large cities as a sort of clearing house for such
activities and as means of interpreting one race to the
other. It has now eighteen branches in cities to which this
migration has been directed. Through a local worker these
migrants are approached, properly placed and supervised
until they can adjust themselves to the community without
apparent embarrassment to either race. The League has been
able to handle the migrants arriving by extending the work
so as to know their movements beforehand.
The occupations in which these people engage will throw
further light on their situation. About ninety per cent of
them do unskilled labor. Only ten per cent of them do
semi-skilled or skilled labor. They serve as common
laborers, puddlers, mold-setters, painters, carpenters,
bricklayers, cement workers and machinists. What the Negroes
need then is that sort of freedom which carries with it
industrial opportunity and social justice. This they cannot
attain until they be permitted to enter the higher pursuits
of labor. Two reasons are given for failure to enter these:
first, that Negro labor is unstable and inefficient; and
second, that white men will protest. Organized labor,
however, has done nothing to help the blacks. Yet it is a
fact that accustomed to the easy-going toil of the
plantation, the blacks have not shown the same efficiency as
that of the whites. Some employers report, however, that
they are glad to have them because they are more
individualistic and do not like to group. But it is not true
that colored labor cannot be organized. The blacks have
merely been neglected by organized labor. Wherever they have
had the opportunity to do so, they have organized and stood
for their rights like men. The trouble is that the trades
unions are generally antagonistic to Negroes although they
are now accepting the blacks in self-defense. The policy of
excluding Negroes from these bodies is made effective by an
evasive procedure, despite the fact that the constitutions
of many of them specifically provide that there shall be no
discrimination on account of race or color.
Because of this tendency some of the representatives of
trades unions have asked why Negroes do not organize unions
of their own. This the Negroes have generally failed to do,
thinking that they would not be recognized by the American
Federation of Labor, and knowing too that what their union
would have to contend with in the economic world would be
diametrically opposed to the wishes of the men from whom
they would have to seek recognition. Organized labor,
moreover, is opposed to the powerful capitalists, the only
real friends the Negroes have in the North to furnish them
food and shelter while their lives are often being sought by
union members. Steps toward organizing Negro labor have been
made in various Northern cities during 1917 and 1918.13
The objective of this movement for the present, however, is
largely that of employment.
Eventually the Negro migrants will, no doubt, without much
difficulty establish themselves among law-abiding and
industrious people of the North where they will receive
assistance. Many persons now see in this shifting of the
Negro population the dawn of a new day, not in making the
Negro numerically dominant anywhere to obtain political
power, but to secure for him freedom of movement from
section to section as a competitor in the industrial world.
They also observe that while there may be an increase of
race prejudice in the North the same will in that proportion
decrease in the South, thus balancing the equation while
giving the Negro his best chance in the economic world out
of which he must emerge a real man with power to secure his
rights as an American citizen.
Footnotes
1: "New York Times", Sept.
5, 9, 28, 1916. 2: "Ibid"., Oct. 18, 28;
Nov. 5, 7, 12, 15; Dec. 4, 9, 1916. 3: "The Crisis", July, 1917. 4: "American Journal of
Political Economy", XXX, p. 1040. 5: "The World's Work", XX,
p. 271. 6: "The World's Work", XX,
p. 272. 7: "New York Times", March
29, April 7, 9, May 30 and 31, 1917. 8: "Survey", XXXVII, pp.
569-571 and XXXVIII, pp. 27, 226, 331, 428;
"Forum", LVII, p. 181; "The World's Work",
XXXIV, pp. 135, 314-319; "Outlook", CXVI,
pp. 520-521; "Independent", XCI, pp. 53-54. 9: "The Crisis", 1917. 10: "The New Orleans Times
Picayune", March 26, 1914. 11: "American Journal of
Social Science", XI, p. 4. 12: Epstein, "The Negro
Migrant in Pittsburgh". 13: Epstein, "The Negro
Migrant in Pittsburgh".
