The Negro Moves

The Negro's flight from the South is quickening.

Between 1940 and 1950, according tc U.S. Census Bureau figures released last week, seven Southern states lost an overall total of 249,360 Negroes, while their white population increased by 2,046,511. Georgia lost 21,440, Alabama 1,621, Mississippi 86,984, Arkansas 55,300, Oklahoma 31,410, Texas 41,279, Kentucky 11,326.

Where had the Negroes moved? Some had moved to booming Florida, whose Negro population increased 89,830. But most had moved North.

Last week's figures showed that the tide of Negro migration to the North, begun just after the Civil War, had swelled to a record crest during World War II and the postwar boom. "Nonwhite" population in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania rose by 558,135. In industrial Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, non-whites increased by 599,417. And in 1940-1950, a new magnet had appeared--California, where non-white population swelled by 328,376 in the decade.

In 1910, 88.7% of all U.S. Negroes lived in the South. In 1950, only 68% did. But even in the industrial states where the immigration has been heaviest, Negroes comprise only about 7% of the total population, as opposed to 21.6% in the South (down from 23.8 in 1940).

Outside the South, the Negro still meets with discrimination; his lot in Harlem, Chicago's South Side or Detroit's East Side is in many respects worse than that from which he fled. Yet few return. And the slow spreading and thinning out of the Negro population throughout the nation is a major factor in his growing acceptance as a full citizen.

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