University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII

THE MIGRATION OF THE TALENTED TENTH

IN spite of these interstate movements, the
Negro still continued as a perplexing problem,
for the country was unprepared to grant
the race political and civil rights. Nominal
equality was forced on the South at the point of
the sword and the North reluctantly removed
most of its barriers against the blacks. Some,
still thinking, however, that the two races could
not live together as equals, advocated ceding
the blacks the region on the Gulf of Mexico.[1]
This was branded as chimerical on the ground
that, deprived of the guidance of the whites,
these States would soon sink to African level
and the end of the experiment would be a reconquest
and a military regime fatal to the true development
of American institutions.[2] Another
plan proposed was the revival of the old colonization
idea of sending Negroes to Africa, but
this exhibited still less wisdom than the first in
that it was based on the hypothesis of deporting
a nation, an expense which no government
would be willing to incur. There were then no
physical means of transporting six or seven millions

of people, moreover, as there would be a
new born for every one the agents of colonization
could deport.[3]

With the deportation scheme still kept before
the people by the American Colonization Society,
the idea of emigration to Africa did not
easily die. Some Negroes continued to emigrate
to Liberia from year to year. This policy
was also favored by radicals like Senator Morgan,
of Alabama, who, after movements like
the Ku Klux Klan had done their work of intimidating
Negroes into submission to the domination
of the whites, concluded that most of the
race believed that there was no future for the
blacks in the United States and that they were
willing to emigrate. These radicals advocated
the deportation of the blacks to prevent the
recurrence of "Negro domination." This plan
was acceptable to the whites in general also,
for, unlike the consensus of opinion of today, it
was then thought that the South could get along
without the Negro.[4] Even newspapers like the
Charleston News and Courier, which denounced
the persecution of the Negroes, urged them to
emigrate to Africa as they could not be permitted
to rule over the white people. The Minneapolis
Times wished the scheme success and

Godspeed and believed that the sooner it was
carried out the better it would be for the
Negroes.

Most of the influential newspapers of the
country, however, urged the contrary. Citing
the progress of the Negroes since emancipation
to show that the blacks were doing their full
share toward developing the wealth of the
South, the Indianapolis Journal characterized
as barbarism the suggestion that the government
should furnish them transportation to
Africa. "The ancestors of most of the Negroes
now in this country," said the editor, "have
doubtless been here as long as those of Senator
Morgan, and their descendants are as thoroughly
acclimated and have as good a right here
as the Senator himself."[5] This was the opinion
of all useful Negroes except Bishop H. M.
Turner, who endorsed Morgan's plan by advocating
the emigration of one fourth of the
blacks to Africa. The editor of the Chicago
Record-Herald entreated Turner to temper his
enthusiasm with discretion before he involved
in unspeakable disaster any more of his trustful
compatriots.

Speaking more plainly to the point, the editor
of the Philadelphia North American said that
the true interest of the South was to accommodate
itself to changed conditions and that the

duty of the freedmen lies in making themselves
worth more in the development of the South
than they were as chattels. Although recognizing
the disabilities and hardships of the
South both to the whites and the blacks, he
could not believe that the elimination of the
Negroes would, if practicable, give relief.[6] The
Boston Herald inquired whether it was worth
while to send away a laboring population in the
absence of whites to take its place and referred
to the misfortunes of Spain which undertook to
carry out such a scheme. Speaking the real
truth, The Milwaukee Journal said that no one
needed to expect any appreciable decrease in
the black population through any possible emigration,
no matter how successful it might be.
"The Negro," said the editor, "is here to stay
and our institutions must be adapted to com
prehend him and develop his possibilities."
The Colored American, then the leading Negro
organ of thought in the United States, believed
that the Negroes should be thankful to Senator
Morgan for his attitude on emigration, because
he might succeed in deporting to Africa those
Negroes who affect to believe that this is not
their home and the more quickly we get rid of
such foolhardy people the better it will be for
the stalwart of the race.[7]

A number of Negroes, however, under the inspiration

of leaders[8] like Bishop H. M. Turner,
did not feel that the race had a fair chance in
the United States. A few of them emigrated to
Wapimo, Mexico; but, becoming dissatisfied
with the situation there, they returned to their
homes in Georgia and Alabama in 1895. The
coming of the Negroes into Mexico caused suspicion
and excitement. A newspaper, El
Tiempo, which had been denouncing lynching
in the United States, changed front when these
Negroes arrived in that country.

Going in quest of new opportunities and desiring
to reenforce the civilization of Liberia,
197 other Negroes sailed from Savannah, Georgia,
for Liberia, March 19, 1895. Commending
this step, the Macon Telegraph referred to their
action as a rebellion against the social laws
which govern all people of this country. This
organ further said that it was the outcome of a
feeling which has grown stronger and stronger
year by year among the Negroes of the Southern
States and which will continue to grow with
the increase of education and intelligence
among them. The editor conceded that they had
an opportunity to better their material condition
and acquire wealth here but contended that
they had no chance to rise out of the peasant
class. The Memphis Commercial Appeal urged
the building of a large Negro nation in Africa
as practicable and desirable, for it was "more

and more apparent that the Negro in this country
must remain an alien and a disturber," because
there was "not and can never be a future
for him in this country." The Florida Times
Union felt that this colonization scheme, like all
others, was a fraud. It referred to the Negro's
being carried to the land of plenty only to find
out that there, as everywhere else in the world,
an existence must be earned by toil and that his
own old sunny southern home is vastly the better
place.[9]

Only a few intelligent Negroes, however, had
reached the position of being contented in the
South. The Negroes eliminated from politics
could not easily bring themselves around to
thinking that they should remain there in a state
of recognized inferiority, especially when during
the eighties and nineties there were many
evidences that economic as well as political conditions
would become worse. The exodus
treated in the previous chapter was productive
of better treatment for the Negroes and an increase
in their wages in certain parts of the
South but the migration, contrary to the expectations
of many, did not bcome general. Actual
prosperity was impossible even if the whites had
been willing to give the Negro peasants a fair
chance. The South had passed through a disastrous
war, the effects of which so blighted the
hopes of its citizens in the economic world that

their land seemed to pass, so to speak, through
a dark age. There was then little to give the
man far down when the one to whom he of necessity
looked for employment was in his turn bled
by the merchant or the banker of the larger
cities, to whom he had to go for extensive
credits.[10]

Southern planters as a class, however, had not
much sympathy for the blacks who had once
been their property and the tendency to cheat
them continued, despite the fact that many
farmers in the course of time extricated themselves
from the clutches of the loan sharks.
There were a few Negroes who, thanks to the
honesty of certain southern gentlemen, succeeded
in acquiring considerable property in
spite of their handicaps.[11] They yielded to the
white man's control in politics, when it seemed
that it meant either to abandon that field or die,
and devoted themselves to the accumulation of
wealth and the acquisition of education.

This concession, however, did not satisfy the
radical whites, as they thought that the Negro
might some day return to power. Unfortunately,
therefore, after the restoration of the
control of the State governments to the master
class, there swept over these commonwealths a

wave of hostile legislation demanded by the poor
white uplanders determined to debase the blacks
to the status of the free Negroes prior to the Civil
War.[12] The Negroes have, therefore, been disfranchised
in most reconstructed States, deprived
of the privilege of serving in the State
militia, segregated in public conveyances, and
excluded from public places of entertainment.
They have, moreover, been branded by public
opinion as pariahs of society to be used for
exploitation but not to be encouraged to expect
that their status can ever be changed so as to
destroy the barriers between the races in their
social and political relations.

This period has been marked also by an effort
to establish in the South a system of peonage
not unlike that of Mexico, a sort of involuntary
servitude in that one is considered legally bound
to serve his master until a debt contracted is
paid. Such laws have been enacted in Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina
and South Carolina. No such distinction in law
has been able to stand the constitutional test of
the United States courts as was evidenced by
the decision of the Supreme Court in 1911 declaring
the Alabama law unconstitutional.[13] But the planters of the South, still a law unto
themselves, have maintained actual slavery in

sequestered districts where public opinion
against peonage is too weak to support federal
authorities in exterminating it.[14] The Negroes
themselves dare not protest under penalty of
persecution and the peon concerned usually accepts
his lot like that of a slave. Some years
ago it was commonly reported that in trying to
escape, the persons undertaking it often fail and
suffer death at the hands of the planter or of
murderous mobs, giving as their excuse, if any
be required, that the Negro is a desperado or
some other sort of criminal.

Unfortunately this reaction extended also to
education. Appropriations to public schools
for Negroes diminished from year to year and
when there appeared practical leaders with
their sane plan for industrial education the South
ignorantly accepted this scheme as a desirable
subterfuge for seeming to support Negro education
and at the same time directing the development
of the blacks in such a way that they
would never become the competitors of the white
people. This was not these educators' idea
but the South so understood it and in effecting
the readjustment, practically left the Negroes
out of the pale of the public school systems.
Consequently, there has been added to the Negroes'
misfortunes, in the South, that of being
unable to obtain liberal education at public expense,
although they themselves, as the largest

consumers in some parts, pay most of the taxes
appropriated to the support of schools for the
youth of the other race.[15]

The South, moreover, has adopted the policy
of a more general intimidation of the Negroes
to keep them down. The lynching of the blacks,
at first for assaults on white women and later
for almost any offense, has rapidly developed
as an institution. Within the past fifty years[16]
there have been lynched in the South about 4,000
Negroes, many of whom have been publicly
burned in the daytime to attract crowds that
usually enjoy such feats as the tourney of the
Middle Ages. Negroes who have the courage to
protest against this barbarism have too often
been subjected to indignities and in some cases
forced to leave their communities or suffer the
fate of those in behalf of whom they speak.
These crimes of white men were at first kept
secret but during the last two generations the
culprits have become known as heroes, so popular
has it been to murder Negroes. It has often
been discovered also that the officers of these
communities take part in these crimes and the
worst of all is that politicians like Tillman,
Blease and Vardaman glory in recounting the
noble deeds of those who deserve so well of their
countrymen for making the soil red with the Negroes'

blood rather than permit the much feared
Africanization of southern institutions.[17]

In this harassing situation the Negro has
hoped that the North would interfere in his behalf,
but, with the reactionary Supreme Court
of the United States interpreting this hostile
legislation as constitutional in conformity with
the demands of prejudiced public opinion, and
with the leaders of the North inclined to take
the view that after all the factions in the South
must be left alone to fight it out, there has been
nothing to be expected from without. Matters
too have been rendered much worse because the
leaders of the very party recently abandoning
the freedmen to their fate, aggravated the critical
situation by first setting the Negroes
against their former masters, whom they were
taught to regard as their worst enemies whether
they were or not.

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 aristocratie

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

[ILLUSTRATION]

Map Showing the Per Cent of Negroes in Total Population, by States: 1910.

(Map 2, Bulletin 129, The United States Bureau of the Census.)

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

[ILLUSTRATION]

Diagram Showing the Negro Population of Northern and
Western Cities in 1900 and the Extent to which it
Increased by 1910.

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

Counties in the Southern States Having at least 50 Per Cent of their Population Negro.

(Maps 3 and 4, Bulletin 129, U. S. Bureau of the Census.)

Counties in the Southern States Having at least 50 Per Cent of their Population Negro.

(Maps 5 and 6, Bulletin 129, U. S. Bureau of the Census.)

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.