PART TWO
THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH
CHAPTER VI
FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH
Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the “Southern attitude” and the “Northern attitude” throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national problem in this country.
Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar, lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and, by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly, perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.
Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities, but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities, increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10 per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a famous Negro agricultural colony—one of the few in the North—shows a distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to 1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.