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 comprehend 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 become 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 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.]