[ ] [ [29] ] "Fully ninety-four per cent. have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape towards which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, migration to town ... this is a part of the rush to town." Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 162. "The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes" (p. 170). Here, again, evidence may be supplied in any measure desired. From the census reports it appears that in the North the same tendency is quite as strong, if not even stronger.
[ ] [ [30] ] For a minute study of birth and death rates, see infra, pp. 225-49.
[ ] [ [31] ] To be sure, this charge holds in only very modified degree of the modern sanitated city.
[ ] [ [32] ] What a note of infinite melancholy sounds through "The Souls of Black Folk," the finest product of the Mulatto mind. In his "The College-bred Negro," the same author, Dubois, has put the question as to the future of his race to hundreds of these representative Negroes and recorded their answers. It is easy to perceive that the hopefulness of the majority is quite artificial, based on some religious faith or moral trust, and that the really weighty answers are given by the hopeless minority.
[ ] [ [33] ] Events in the North, still fresh in the mind of the reader, illustrate these statements profusely. That the Negro is steadily losing ground industrially as well as otherwise, is witnessed unequivocally in the most diverse quarters. Thus Dubois, "The Philadelphia Negro," p. 43: "It cannot be denied that the main results of the development of the Philadelphia Negro since the war have on the whole disappointed his well-wishers.... Not only do they feel that there is a lack of positive results, but the relative advance compared with the period just before the war is slow, if not an actual retrogression; an abnormal and growing amount of crime and poverty can justly be charged to the Negro; he is not a large taxpayer, holds no conspicuous place in the business world or the world of letters, and even as a workingman seems to be losing ground." So, too, in Chicago: "There are a few in the trades, as carpenters, painters, etc., but these are decreasing.... There is a large class of unemployed Negroes in the city, numbering several hundreds. Could a careful census of this class be taken, it would no doubt be found to reach into thousands." Monro N. Work, in American Journal of Sociol., Vol. 6, p. 206. Everywhere throughout the South this expulsive process has already proceeded far and stiff proceeds apace. In the foregoing, the italics are ours.
[ ] [ [34] ] The late Professor E. D. Cope recommended the deportation of the Negro.
[ ] [ [35] ] Witness Schweinfurth, one of the carefulest observers and highest authorities: "If we could at once grasp and set before our minds facts that are known (whether as regards language, race, culture, history, or development) of that vast region of the world which is comprehended in the name of Africa, we should have before us the witness of an intermingling of races which is beyond all precedent. And yet, bewildering as the prospect would appear, it remains a fact not to be gainsaid, that it is impossible for any one to survey the country as a whole without perceiving that, high above the multiplication of individual differences, there is throned a principle of unity (he refers to the autochthonous black stock), which embraces well-nigh all the population" (Heart of Africa, Vol. I., p. 313).
[ ] [ [36] ] More probably 260.
[ ] [ [37] ] More probably 365.
[ ] [ [38] ] These are the "uncorrected rates" in the registration area. The rates corrected—on the basis of age distribution—are still far more ominous for the Negro. They are, in the entire registration area: for native Whites having one or both parents foreign, 187; for native Whites having both parents native, 166; for Negroids, 347.