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EXODUS
The Negro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—he must go away from here. It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro. He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,” in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbance must take place before the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day. With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities, are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North.
While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes. There is nothing that will undermine the constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the real Negro ozone.
There has been during the last three years a steady migration of Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department of Labor Report:[5]
“General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations, poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and, finally, advice of white friends in the South where crops had failed.”
It is impossible to calculate the numbers with any likelihood of accuracy. Even the census of 1920 will hardly indicate what has taken place—for no one can say what allowance ought to be made for natural increase in the last ten years. But the insurance companies reckon that between May, 1916, and September, 1917, between thirty-five and forty thousand Negroes left Georgia. Perhaps the net loss to the South has been a quarter of a million, the majority young, single men and women. Some certainly put the figure higher. The movement has slowed down, owing to the after-the-war stagnancy in trade, the very bad housing conditions in the North, the race riot in Chicago, and other retarding influences. With a revival of trade it may go on more rapidly. Certainly whenever a countryside in the South is visited by some special act of violence there is a tendency for the colored population to flee. Unfortunately, the lot of migrants of the type of Negroes is always a hard one. It is difficult to settle down in a new community. Irregular habits bring disease. Provincial dullness makes it difficult to find a job or to evade sharpers. Unfortunately, also, Negroes are not by nature altruistic, not clannish like the Jews. They do not help one another in distress as much as poor Whites do. So many who flee northward inevitably come to grief.
It is urged in the South that the North is not entirely appreciative of the influx of so many Negroes. But, on the other hand, it is alleged that the large Northern companies sent their agents into every State in the South seeking labor. It was certainly useful to the companies. And although the loose and nondescript unemployed immigrants were guilty of a number of crimes, it is generally held that those who found employment proved very steady and reliable. The Negro proved a safe man in the munition factory, and it was found he could do a white man’s job in a mine and in the steel works. The employers of labor were well pleased. But there was a section of the community that was not pleased, and that was the working class—the poor Whites once more, who saw in Negro migration an influx of non-union labor, depressing wages, and lowering the standard of living. The workingmen speedily quarreled with the Negro—seeing in him the oft encountered strike breaker. Those who have gone through the Negro district of Chicago, with its filthy, ramshackle frame buildings occupied by Negro families, a family to a room, know how appalling is the aspect of the Negro there. In the old days the white population took it as a matter of course, as they did so many other things in this evil industrial conglomeration so aptly called the Jungle. But too much competition and too many unfamiliar, gloomy Negro faces on the streets caused the nervous shock which accounted for the Chicago riots, begun strangely enough not by a Negro attack, but by a white youth knocking a Negro boy off a raft on the lake and drowning him. The three days’ free fight which ensued was one of the most disillusioning episodes in the history of Northern friendship for the Negro.