And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?
In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South, accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.
Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No people, either black or white, are really free until they feel free. And to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.
A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia, South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there—respected by both races—was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I went to see him.
“Yes,” he said, “I am going away. It’s getting to be too dangerous for a coloured man down here.”
It was just after the Atlanta riot.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I think I shall go to Washington,” he said.
“Why Washington?”
“Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can.”