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,