THE NEGRO HEGIRA.
It is not many months since we had to record the Liberian exodus fever. The movement which excited so great hopes among the deluded blacks has passed out of sight, and the holders of ten-dollar shares in the barque Azor are no nearer the tropical shores of Africa than they were a year ago. From those who went out in so ill-advised a manner, for a long time almost nothing came back to us but their wail of suffering as they reached their journey’s end.
And now another impulse has seized upon thousands apparently of the negro population of Mississippi and Louisiana, to leave the places where they were born and reared and seek new homes. As early as the middle of March probably fifteen hundred had found their way to St. Louis under the impression, it is said, that they would be supported in that city and provided with free transportation to Kansas, where, on arrival, they would receive from the Government, lands, mules, money and agricultural implements. A small proportion of them appeared to be in comfortable circumstances, and proceeded by steamer or rail to Kansas City or Topeka. Others were entirely destitute and dependent from the first on charitable aid. Thousands more were reported as only deterred from coming by lack of means to pay their way up the river. The mayor and citizens of St. Louis were in quite a panic over their visitors. What should they do with them, or how keep them away? But the feeling of kinship led the colored people of the city to give them such welcome as they might. The basements of three colored churches were opened to them, and food and shelter were generously given by their brethren according to the flesh, and they were helped toward their destination as far as might be.
Thus another is added to the many strange, sad stories in the history of this dark-skinned race. This sudden impulse moving upon this great mass of men and women may not have been reasonable, and yet it must have had a reason. Kansas seems to be to them a magical name, synonymous with freedom, friends and happiness, in their crude thought. It was sought to turn some of them to Iowa, where work and pay were offered; but no, Kansas was the goal from which they could not be turned away. There seems to be no possible interpretation of this so general migration, other than that they have given up in despair the thought of peace or prosperity in their old homes. For of all the inhabitants of our soil they are the least migratory in their nature; they cling to the old State and the old homestead on which they were reared. But repeated wrongs have worked at last on their slow minds the conviction that better things can only be in store for them far away. Not political deprivations, for they seem easily to have given up that contest, and they “don’t vote much;” but the wrongs of a hard tenantry system, by which they have been compelled to rent land at $10 an acre for the year—land worth not much more than that at sale—with various other extortionate charges by the way, bringing the laborer out at the year’s end no better, but rather the worse off for all his toil, and with no liberty even of complaint; these are the things which have at length wrought out their natural and inevitable result.
The consequences of this movement, if it be suffered to go on—and who can stop it?—are manifold and of most serious import. The planters are already alarmed at the lack of laborers for the year which is just opening upon them. A desertion of “hands” is a most dire calamity in an agricultural community. Political changes may follow those of population, and if this hegira goes on, the proportion of representation may be seriously changed between Louisiana and Kansas.
There can be no question but that the negro can, if he be well treated, do better in the Gulf States than in the cold climate of Kansas—at raising cotton and the sugar-cane than wheat and stock. Is there no serious warning in this movement to the people of those States?—a lesson not political so much as industrial; an intimation that fair treatment even of the lowest, poorest and most ignorant classes, especially if they are held by no artificial bond like ownership, is essential to a rendering of the service for which they were valued once as slaves, and for which they are no less indispensable as freemen. There is policy as well as right in justice, and the law of gravitation is as real and as irresistible in masses of men as in the realm of material things. The South needs the negro quite as much as the negro needs the South; and unless its leaders of thought and action help its people to recognize their mutual dependence, and teach them to conciliate and not to abuse the arm that is ready to sow and gather their crops, they will have to do without it. The present hegira is but a hint of what may be. Is it not a hint, also, as to how so great a loss may be avoided? For, after all, dislike the truth who may, the negro is “a man and a brother.”