LITTLE IMMIGRATION OF NEGROES
IN the last ten years the official records show that 37,000 negroes have left other countries to take residence in the United States. I can find no evidence to show that any considerable number of black people have given up residence in America.
The striking fact is, that negroes from other countries are constantly coming into the United States, and few are going out. This seems in part to answer the question as to whether the negro is having a fair chance in America as compared with any other country in which negroes live in any large numbers.
By far the largest number of negro immigrants come from the West Indies. Even Haiti, a free negro republic, furnishes a considerable number of immigrants every year. In all my experience and observation, however, I cannot recall a single instance in which a negro has left the United States to become a citizen of the Haitian Republic. On the other hand, not a few leaders of thought and action among the negroes in the United States are those who have given up citizenship in the little Black Republic in order to live under the Stars and Stripes. The majority of the colored people who come from the West Indies do so because of the economic opportunities which the United States offers them. Another large group, however, comes to get education. Here at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama we usually have not far from one hundred students from South America and the various West Indian Islands. In the matter of opportunity to secure the old-fashioned, abstract book education several of the West Indian Islands give negroes a better chance than is afforded them in most of our Southern States, but for industrial and technical education they are compelled to come to the United States.
In the matter of political and civil rights, including protection of life and property and even-handed justice in the courts, negroes in the West Indies have the advantage of negroes in the United States. In the island of Jamaica, for example, there are about 15,000 white people and 600,000 black people, but of the “race problem,” in regard to which there is much agitation in this country, one hears almost nothing there. Jamaica has neither mobs, race riots, lynchings, nor burnings, such as disgrace our civilization. In that country there is likewise no bitterness between white man and black man. One reason for this is that the laws are conceived and executed with exact and absolute justice, without regard to race or color.