Eighteen years ago, before the great world problem of color had arisen, there was nothing to chill the zeal of the British Negrophilist; but in South Africa the British Negrophobe is increasing in numbers and his influence is also being felt in Canada. Still there are opportunities for the Negro yet, if the leaders of the race will only awaken to the necessities of diffusion. But time and tide wait for no man.
As has been attempted to be shown, the idea, not unreasonably entertained soon after the war between the States, that there was apt to be with time, a greater and greater increase of Negro population in the five Southern States, considered as the Black Belt, is no longer tenable.
Immediately after the war the Negroes were in a majority of 19,808 in this belt of contiguous States, which the processes and excesses of Reconstruction did raise to 168,965, discernable four years after its overthrow. But by 1890 this Negro majority had been reduced to 150,661 and by 1900 to 92,610. In the following decade this black majority through white immigration and black emigration, was replaced by a white majority in the so called Black Belt of 423,717; which now has risen to over a million and a quarter. The increase of whites has been greatest in the two States in the center of the belt. In the State of Alabama from the conclusion of the war, the increase of the white majority has been steady and continuous, rising from 45,874 in 1870 to 320,566 in 1910 and to 546,980 in 1920. The increase of the white majority in Georgia was less rapid. Reconstruction had cut down the white majority of 93,884 to 81,773 by 1870, but from the overthrow of Reconstruction it rose to 254,849 in 1910, and has now reached 482,749. Louisiana’s Negro majority of 2,114 in 1870, Reconstruction had raised to 28,701 by 1880, but in the forty years which have followed, it has now become 396,354 whites in excess of blacks.
In the other two States progress has been slower.
South Carolina, laden with Negroes to the very gunwales by the subjects of “King Cotton,” emerged from the storm of war with a Negro majority of 126,147, which Reconstruction speedily increased in “The Prostrate State” to 213,229 by 1880, a number so far beyond her small white population, that even with a decreasing rate of increase, the black majority had increased by 1890 to 226,926, the decrease of which in 1900 was barely perceptible; but by 1910 had fallen to 156,681 and in 1920 was still further reduced to 45,941. And even Mississippi, whose Negro majority rose steadily from 31,305 in 1870, to 266,430 in 1900, dropped in 1910 to 223,338, which by 1920 had fallen to 81,222. This is in all probability due to the migration which Carlyle McKinley predicted in 1889, although Hoffman, who published a painstaking work in 1896, thinking to establish that the Negro was dying out, as “in the Northern States the colored race does not hold his own, for the deaths out number the births,” yet concluded that the Negro was—
“in the South as a permanent factor, with neither the ability nor the inclination to leave.”[304]
As in the North and West the numbers of the Negroes have since 1870 to 1920 risen from 250,000 to 1,550,000 and in the South during the same time from 4,585,000 to 8,990,000, the two assertions above do not hang together.
When we consider the view advanced by that great writer, the author of “The American Commonwealth”, we find it very difficult for him to shake himself loose from the impression that the Negro must remain in the South, and that it is best that he should, although what he says, himself, would seem to disprove the assertion. He finds first evidently by consideration of the census figures up to 1900, that:
“It is thus clear that the Negro center of population is more southward and that the African is leaving the colder, higher and drier lands for regions more resembling his ancient seats in the Old World.”[305]
Carlyle McKinley, with more prophetic ken, eleven years earlier foresaw this, but also beyond what is shown above, that from this region the Negro would move out, North and West.