University of Virginia Library

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
builds 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 wellknown
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.