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.