A Century of Negro Migration - Carter G. Woodson
The last humiliation the Negroes have been forced to submit to is that of
segregation. Here the effort has been to establish a ghetto in cities and
to assign certain parts of the country to Negroes engaged in farming. It
always happens, of course, that the best portion goes to the whites and
the least desirable to the blacks, although the promoters of the
segregation maintain that both races are to be treated equally. The
ultimate aim is to prevent the Negroes of means from figuring
conspicuously in aristocratic districts where they may be brought into
rather close contact with the whites. Negroes see in segregation a settled
policy to keep them down, no matter what they do to elevate themselves.
The southern white man, eternally dreading the miscegenation of the races,
makes the life, liberty and happiness of individuals second to measures
considered necessary to prevent this so-called evil that this enviable
civilization, distinctly American, may not be destroyed. The United States
Supreme Court in the decision of the Louisville segregation case recently
declared these segregation measures unconstitutional.[18]
These restrictions have made the progress of the Negroes more of a problem
in that directed toward social distinction, the Negroes have been denied
the helpful contact of the sympathetic whites. The increasing race
prejudice forces the whites to restrict their open dealing with the blacks
to matters of service and business, maintaining even then the bearing of
one in a sphere which the Negroes must not penetrate. The whites,
therefore, never seeing the blacks as they are, and the blacks never being
able to learn what the whites know, are thrown back on their own
initiative, which their life as slaves could not have permitted to
develop. It makes little difference that the Negroes have been free a few
decades. Such freedom has in some parts been tantamount to slavery, and so
far as contact with the superior class is concerned, no better than that
condition; for under the old regime certain slaves did learn much by close
association with their masters.[19]
For these reasons there has been since the exodus to the West a steady
migration of Negroes from the South to points in the North. But this
migration, mainly due to political changes, has never assumed such large
proportions as in the case of the more significant movements due to
economic causes, for, as the accompanying map shows, most Negroes are
still in the South. When we consider the various classes migrating,
however, it will be apparent that to understand the exodus of the Negroes
to the North, this longer drawn out and smaller movement must be carefully
studied in all its ramifications. It should be noted that unlike some of
the other migrations it has not been directed to any particular State. It
has been from almost all Southern States to various parts of the North and
especially to the largest cities.[20]
What classes then have migrated? In the first place, the Negro
politicians, who, after the restoration of Bourbon rule in the South,
found themselves thrown out of office and often humiliated and
impoverished, had to find some way out of the difficulty. Some few have
been relieved by sympathetic leaders of the Republican party, who secured
for them federal appointments in Washington. These appointments when
sometimes paying lucrative salaries have been given as a reward to those
Negroes who, although dethroned in the South, remain in touch with the
remnant of the Republican party there and control the delegates to the
national conventions nominating candidates for President. Many Negroes of
this class have settled in Washington.[21] In some cases, the observer
witnesses the pitiable scene of a man once a prominent public functionary
in the South now serving in Washington as a messenger or a clerk.
The well-established blacks, however, have not been so easily induced to
go. The Negroes in business in the South have usually been loath to leave
their people among whom they can acquire property, whereas, if they go to
the North, they have merely political freedom with no assurance of an
opportunity in the economic world. But not a few of these have given
themselves up to unrelenting toil with a view to accumulating sufficient
wealth to move North and live thereafter on the income from their
investments. Many of this class now spend some of their time in the North
to educate their children. But they do not like to have these children who
have been under refining influences return to the South to suffer the
humiliation which during the last generation has been growing more and
more aggravating. Endeavoring to carry out their policy of keeping the
Negro down, southerners too often carefully plan to humiliate the
progressive and intelligent blacks and in some cases form mobs to drive
them out, as they are bad examples for that class of Negroes whom they
desire to keep as menials.[22]
There are also the migrating educated Negroes. They have studied history,
law and economics and well understand what it is to get the rights
guaranteed them by the constitution. The more they know the more
discontented they become. They cannot speak out for what they want. No one
is likely to second such a protest, not even the Negroes themselves, so
generally have they been intimidated. The more outspoken they become,
moreover, the more necessary is it for them to leave, for they thereby
destroy their chances to earn a livelihood. White men in control of the
public schools of the South see to it that the subserviency of the Negro
teachers employed be certified beforehand. They dare not complain too much
about equipment and salaries even if the per capita appropriation for the
education of the Negroes be one fourth of that for the whites.[23]
In the higher institutions of learning, especially the State schools, it
is exceptional to find a principal who has the confidence of the Negroes.
The Negroes will openly assert that he is in the pay of the reactionary
whites, whose purpose is to keep the Negro down; and the incumbent himself
will tell his board of regents how much he is opposed by the Negroes
because he labors for the interests of the white race. Out of such
sycophancy it is easily explained why our State schools have been so
ineffective as to necessitate the sending of the Negro youth to private
institutions maintained by northern philanthropy. Yet if an outspoken
Negro happens to be an instructor in a private school conducted by
educators from the North, he has to be careful about contending for a
square deal; for, if the head of his institution does not suggest to him
to proceed conservatively, the mob will dispose of the complainant.[24]
Physicians, lawyers and preachers, who are not so economically dependent
as teachers can exercise no more freedom of speech in the midst of this
triumphant rule of the lawless.
A large number of educated Negroes, therefore, have on account of these
conditions been compelled to leave the South. Finding in the North,
however, practically nothing in their line to do, because of the
proscription by race prejudice and trades unions, many of them lead the
life of menials, serving as waiters, porters, butlers and chauffeurs.
While in Chicago, not long ago, the writer was in the office of a graduate
of a colored southern college, who was showing his former teacher the
picture of his class. In accounting for his classmates in the various
walks of life, he reported that more than one third of them were settled
to the occupation of Pullman porters.
The largest number of Negroes who have gone North during this period,
however, belong to the intelligent laboring class. Some of them have
become discontented for the very same reasons that the higher classes have
tired of oppression in the South, but the larger number of them have gone
North to improve their economic condition. Most of these have migrated to
the large cities in the East and Northwest, such as Philadelphia, New
York, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit and Chicago.
To understand this problem in its urban aspects the accompanying diagram
showing the increase in the Negro population of northern cities during the
first decade of this century will be helpful.
Some of these Negroes have migrated after careful consideration; others
have just happened to go north as wanderers; and a still larger number on
the many excursions to the cities conducted by railroads during the summer
months. Sometimes one excursion brings to Chicago two or three thousand
Negroes, two thirds of whom never go back. They do not often follow the
higher pursuits of labor in the North but they earn more money than they
have been accustomed to earn in the South. They are attracted also by the
liberal attitude of some whites, which, although not that of social
equality, gives the Negroes a liberty in northern centers which leads them
to think that they are citizens of the country.[25]
This shifting in the population has had an unusually significant effect on
the black belt. Frederick Douglass advised the Negroes in 1879 to remain
in the South where they would be in sufficiently large numbers to have
political power,[26] but they have gradually scattered from the black belt
so as to diminish greatly their chances ever to become the political force
they formerly were in this country. The Negroes once had this possibility
in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and, had
the process of Africanization prior to the Civil War had a few decades
longer to do its work, there would not have been any doubt as to the
ultimate preponderance of the Negroes in those commonwealths. The
tendencies of the black population according to the censuses of the United
States and especially that of 1910, however, show that the chances for the
control of these State governments by Negroes no longer exist except in
South Carolina and Mississippi.[27] It has been predicted, therefore,
that, if the same tendencies continue for the next fifty years, there will
be even few counties in which the Negroes will be in a majority. All of
the Southern States except Arkansas showed a proportionate increase of the
white population over that of the black between 1900 and 1910, while West
Virginia and Oklahoma with relatively small numbers of blacks showed, for
reasons stated elsewhere, an increase in the Negro population. Thus we see
coming to pass something like the proposed plan of Jefferson and other
statesmen who a hundred years ago advocated the expansion of slavery to
lessen the evil of the institution by distributing its burdens.[28]
The migration of intelligent blacks, however, has been attended with
several handicaps to the race. The large part of the black population is
in the South and there it will stay for decades to come. The southern
Negroes, therefore, have been robbed of their due part of the talented
tenth. The educated blacks have had no constituency in the North and,
consequently, have been unable to realize their sweetest dreams of the
land of the free. In their new home the enlightened Negro must live with
his light under a bushel. Those left behind in the South soon despair of
seeing a brighter day and yield to the yoke. In the places of the leaders
who were wont to speak for their people, the whites have raised up Negroes
who accept favors offered them on the condition that their lips be sealed
up forever on the rights of the Negro.
This emigration too has left the Negro subject to other evils. There are
many first-class Negro business men in the South, but although there were
once progressive men of color, who endeavored to protect the blacks from
being plundered by white sharks and harpies there have arisen numerous
unscrupulous Negroes who have for a part of the proceeds from such jobbery
associated themselves with ill-designing white men to dupe illiterate
Negroes. This trickery is brought into play in marketing their crops,
selling them supplies, or purchasing their property. To carry out this
iniquitous plan the persons concerned have the protection of the law, for
while Negroes in general are imposed upon, those engaged in robbing them
have no cause to fear.
[Footnote 1: Pike, _The Prostrate State_, pp. 3, 4.]
[Footnote 2: _Spectator_, LXVI, p. 113.]
[Footnote 3: Frederick Douglass pointed out this difficulty prior to the
Civil War.--See John Lobb's _Life and Times of Frederick Douglass_,
p. 250.]
[Footnote 4: Labor was then cheap in the South because of its abundance
and the foreign laborer had not then been tried.]
[Footnote 5: During these years Senator Morgan of Alabama was endeavoring
to arouse the people of the country so as to make this a matter of
national concern.]
[Footnote 6: _Public Opinion_, XVIII, p. 371.]
[Footnote 7: _Ibid._, XVIII, p. 371.]
[Footnote 8: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 817.]
[Footnote 9: _Public Opinion_, XVIII, pp. 370-371.]
[Footnote 10: Because of these conditions the last fifty years has been
considered by some writers as a "dark age," for the South.]
[Footnote 11: The Negroes are now said to be worth more than a billion
dollars. Most of this property is in the hands of southern Negroes.]
[Footnote 12: _American Law Review_, XL, pp. 29, 52, 205, 227, 354,
381, 547, 590, 695, 758, 865, 905.]
[Footnote 13: No. 300.--Original, October Term, 1910.]
[Footnote 14: Hershaw, _Peonage_, pp. 10-11.]
[Footnote 15: These facts are well brought out by Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones'
recent report on Negro Education.]
[Footnote 16: This is based on reports published annually in the
_Chicago Tribune_.]
[Footnote 17: This is the boast of southern men of this type when speaking
to their constituents or in Congress.]
[Footnote 18: _Report_, October Term, 1917.]
[Footnote 19: This danger has been often referred to when the Negroes were
first emancipated.--See _Spectator_, LXVI, p. 113.]
[Footnote 20: Compare the Negro population of Northern States as given in
the census of 1800 with the same in 1900.]
[Footnote 21: Hart, _Southern South_, pp. 171, 172.]
[Footnote 22: This is based on the experience of the writer and others
whom he has interviewed.]
[Footnote 23: In his report on Negro education Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones has
shown this to be an actual fact.]
[Footnote 24: Negroes applying for positions in the South have the
situation set before them so as to know what to expect.]
[Footnote 25: The _American Journal of Political Economy_, XXV, p.
1040.]
[Footnote 26: The _Journal of Social Science_, XI, p. 16.]
[Footnote 27: _American Economic Review_, IV, pp. 281-292.]
[Footnote 28: Ford edition of _Jefferson's Writings_, X, p. 231.]
CHAPTER IX
THE EXODUS DURING THE WORLD WAR
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]