The exodus has driven home the truth that the prosperity of the South is at the mercy of the Negro.  Dependent on cheap labor, which the bulldozing whites will not readily furnish, the wealthy southerners must finally reach the position of regarding themselves and the Negroes as having a community of interests which each must promote.  “Nature itself in those States,” Douglass said, “came to the rescue of the Negro.  He had labor, the South wanted it, and must have it or perish.  Since he was free he could then give it, or withhold it; use it where he was, or take it elsewhere, as he pleased.  His labor made him a slave and his labor could, if he would, make him free, comfortable and independent.  It is more to him than either fire, sword, ballot boxes or bayonets.  It touches the heart of the South through its pocket."[11] Knowing that the Negro has this silent weapon to be used against his employer or the community, the South is already giving the race better educational facilities, better railway accommodations, and will eventually, if the advocacy of certain southern newspapers be heeded, grant them political privileges.  Wages in the South, therefore, have risen even in the extreme southwestern States, where there is an opportunity to import Mexican labor.  Reduced to this extremity, the southern aristocrats have begun to lose some of their race prejudice, which has not hitherto yielded to reason or philanthropy.

Southern men are telling their neighbors that their section must abandon the policy of treating the Negroes as a problem and construct a program for recognition rather than for repression.  Meetings are, therefore, being held to find out what the Negro wants and what may be done to keep them contented.  They are told that the Negro must be elevated not exploited, that to make the South what it must needs be, the cooperation of all is needed to train and equip the men of all races for efficiency.  The aim of all then must be to reform or get rid of the unfair proprietors who do not give their tenants a fair division of the returns from their labor.  To this end the best whites and blacks are urged to come together to find a working basis for a systematic effort in the interest of all.

To say that either the North or the South can easily become adjusted to this change is entirely too sanguine.  The North will have a problem.  The Negroes in the northern city will have much more to contend with than when settled in the rural districts or small urban centers.  Forced by restrictions of real estate men into congested districts, there has appeared the tendency toward further segregation.  They are denied social contact, are sagaciously separated from the whites in public places of amusement and are clandestinely segregated in public schools in spite of the law to the contrary.  As a consequence the Negro migrant often finds himself with less friends than he formerly had.  The northern man who once denounced the South on account of its maltreatment of the blacks gradually grows silent when a Negro is brought next door.  There comes with the movement, therefore, the difficult problem of housing.