A Century of Negro Migration eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 186 pages of information about A Century of Negro Migration.

A Century of Negro Migration eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 186 pages of information about A Century of Negro Migration.

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.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
A Century of Negro Migration from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.