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]