Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation—a drive of some eight miles. In common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer, or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country. From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement. White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear was not absent even among these people.
I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi, which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:
I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it’s because we never take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o’clock at night—because I am afraid.
As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.
Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course, remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too, grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town, they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of comfort that they never before imagined possible.
Story of the Mill People
Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old fellow said rather pathetically:
“When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country.”
But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country people.
All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.