I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and more difficult problems were constantly arising.
Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of prejudice.
While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon, and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their strong Southern point of view.
Pathetic Expectations of the Negro
One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed within the limitations set up by the South, it is indeed the promised land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked him why he wanted to leave the South.
“They’re Jim Crowin’ us down here too much,” he said; “there’s no chance for a coloured man who has any self-respect.”
“But,” I said, “do you know that you will be better off when you get to Indianapolis?”
“I hear they don’t make no difference up there between white folks and coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that all so?”
“Yes, that’s pretty nearly so,” I said—but as I looked at the fairly comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.
And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant, semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better conditions of life, a better chance for their children.