Migrate North

Negro labor, the great black section of America's casual worker army of ten million, is migrating to the North. If a report issued by the Department of Agriculture is correct, the exodus of Negroes northward almost rivals the phenomenal movement of 1915-16. Our last census revealed an increase for the decade of 400,000 in the number of Southern-born Negroes living in the North. The best authorities estimate that 250,000 went North in 1915-16. It was a great silent movement, without leadership, or even self-consciousness, which caught at the South like an infectious fever and sucked whole communities away by the nearest railroad. Everyone thought it a war incident that could hot be repeated.

Yet Washington now reports for the lower Southern states a migration of like magnitude. Georgia, the State worst hit, is said to have lost 32,000 of her Negro farm population; South Carolina, 22,750; Alabama more than 20,000; Arkansas, 15,000. These figures would be even greater if we knew accurately how many Negroes had left the towns. The border States were immune for a while, but are now joining the movement.

The three main causes are typical of all Negro migrations to the North: 1) the boll weevil; 2) the recruiting agents for labor and the attractive offers of high wages in Northern industries, 3) the growing resentment against unfair treatment of colored workers in the South.

Added to these incentives are are the discontent of returned colored troops with traditional living conditions south of the Mason-Dixon line, the breakdown of the contract labor system, recent crop failures and general agricultural bankruptcy among Southern planters. " The wonder is," remarks The New York Globe, " that the Negro did not walk out long ago."