A New South--the Negro Migration
I
MEN, like birds, seem subject to sudden mass movements from one place to another. From the dawn of history tales have come down to us of these shiftings among the tribes of the earth. Abraham, with his people, left the land of the Chaldees and pitched his tents in Canaan; the Children of Israel turned their backs upon the land of bondage; and from the mysterious highlands of Central Asia came wave after wave, sweeping over continents, changing history in their course, and breaking at last on the distant shores of the Atlantic.
The exact causes of bird migrations remain obscure to science, although seasonal and climatic changes are undoubtedly involved. But, knowing as we do far more of the minds of men than we know of the ways of birds, one can nearly always, upon investigation and study, determine exactly the underlying causes of strange tides that ebb and flow through the sea of human affairs. History itself may be regarded as but a record of the causes and effects of the long series of these man migrations. So long as the different tribes remain stationary and contented, each in its accustomed place, the years that pass, while peaceful, are not long remembered. But when men are driven forth by diverse causes, economic, religious, racial, or again at the call of ambition or for mere adventure’s sake, then are set in motion forces that mean the rise and fall of nations and the lasting exile of peoples to alien lands.
Considering the importance and the far-reaching effects of these moments of human unrest, it is interesting to inquire into the motives, and also to speculate upon the consequences, of such a racial wave as we see gathering force in our own country and generation.
The intricate social and political problems occasioned by the presence of two dissimilar races in the United States have heretofore been deemed purely sectional matters. By anyone at all familiar with the history of the country for the past two centuries it was easily understood why the Negro race was found almost entirely within the Southern states, and it was assumed that it would probably always remain there. Now suddenly the race, moved by some widespread impulse, begins of its own volition a migration northward which may alter the entire aspect of the racial question in America, and possibly swell into one of those mighty floods which, like the flight of Tatar tribes, changes history.
The matter has but recently begun to occupy the attention of the press, and one learns with surprise that the movement, first noted about two years ago, has already shifted nearly half a million of our colored citizens to the states of the North and West. In less than twelve months forty thousand colored farm-laborers have left Georgia. From replies to a recent inquiry sent out by the Agricultural College of South Carolina it appears that during the period of six months ending May 1, 1923, forty-one counties in that state sent North fifty thousand Negroes, chiefly adult laborers. It is difficult to take in the full significance of these figures when applied to sparsely settled districts. One county, for instance, reports the loss of 3600 Negroes, or just 22 per cent of its entire population, white and black. It further reports the abandonment of 2520 farms during the present season, showing that in the Cotton Belt the Negro exodus and the agricultural crisis go hand in hand. Another Carolina county, celebrated in the old days as standing second in the United States in point of cotton production, claims to have lost 3500 Negroes since the planting of the present crop.
It has been the cause of some editorial comment in Northern papers that, in spite of the approach of the harvest season, so little concern is manifest in the South over the diminution of her labor supply, the chief note sounded by Southern papers being one of warning to the Negroes that conditions in the North may prove less attractive than they have been led to believe. Quite wide publicity is also given to any rumors of race-friction north of the Potomac, or of instances where the newcomers have failed to find employment.
While such comment may not be entirely disinterested when coming from quarters that fear acute laborshortage as an immediate result, the most generally expressed opinion is that of the governor of one of those Southern states most vitally concerned. In a statement given out to the papers he declares the matter one that concerns only the Negro, and one that he must decide for himself. If his condition will be bettered by leaving, then no argument can be adduced which will cause him to remain, and the Southern white man must do the best he can without him.
If the South is calm over the potential loss of her labor supply, it is largely because she realizes that the exodus is but an effect and not the cause of her agricultural troubles.
An analysis of the situation would reveal, I believe, that while the Negro was a necessary factor in that older civilization of the South which reached its culmination in the eighteen-sixties, and for a full generation afterward cast a glow over Southern life, it is realized now that, owing to economic and agricultural change, the section is definitely entering upon a new phase in which the Negro, as the South visualizes him, can play almost no part.
The industrial portions of the South, which just now claim a considerable place in the public eye, are apart from any consideration of the question. Here the Negro population has always been small, has never taken any part in industry; and so, to these busy sections, it is a matter of indifference whether this minor, nonessential group goes or stays. Nearly all the exodus, however, is from the purely agricultural districts of the flat, coastal plains which have always teemed with an overwhelming mass of Negro labor. So long as Cotton was king and needed vast armies of untrained, unskilled privates to maintain his rule in the fields, this labor formed a vital link in the economic life of such communities. Now, with the cotton-growing industry prostrate, one matter of grave concern has been the presence of the helpless mass of unneeded tenants, serf-like laborers, and small landowners, who with their families crowded into towns and villages from abandoned farms. If this mass will of its own accord transfer itself to other sections, then, many feel, one pressing phase of the boll-weevil problem will have been well solved.
Back in 1920, when it became patent to all that the boll weevil was soon to overspread the entire Cotton Belt and cause a reduction in the output of American cotton, a working solution of the South’s coming crisis seemed simpler than it does to-day. Then the world demand for cotton was small, the carry-over large — apparently more than sufficient for years to come. On the other hand, the demand for foodstuffs was enormous and seemed bound to continue, with starving nations calling to us for bread. Our government issued its appeal to the farmers of the country to raise more food in order to avert world famine. Under these conditions the South eagerly subscribed to the apparently obvious doctrine that her future prosperity lay in relegating cotton to a minor position and making grain, hogs, cattle, and truck her chief money-crops.
Inspired by such examples of quick success, the entire Cotton Belt was ready to follow this lead as a sure road to avoid financial stagnation. Everywhere bankers, supply-merchants, and public officials preached to the farmer diversification. The farmer who refused to hearken to the new gospel obtained money or credit with difficulty; the farmer who sought assistance in the purchase of pure-bred stock, grain seed, and modern machinery obtained it. So, having listened to his advisers, the Southern farmer produced food-crops as never before in his career.
Then came the era of quick deflation. From one season to the next the price to the grower for peanuts, for example, fell from $240 to $40 the ton; corn rapidly fell from a dollar and a half to fifty cents and under; many perishables, costly to cultivate, would not bring freight charges to consuming markets; and hogs and cattle dropped to less than it cost the small farmer to raise them. Having seen the vision of her salvation as a great grainand meat-producing section, the South awoke to the grim truth that, save in abnormal times, other sections can produce and transport into her midst many of these commodities more cheaply than she can make them at home. Sandy lands, divided up into small patches, requiring the annual stimulation of high-priced fertilizer and tilled by inefficient Cuffy and his mule, cannot compete, year in and year out, with limitless prairie acres, gangploughs, and tractors.
Just at this juncture, further to complicate the situation, the price of cotton began to climb to double, treble any remembered pre-war levels, so that the average farmer figured for himself that at such prices a half or a quarter of his old yield of cotton would better fill the hungry little mouths in the cabin and clothe the patient wife who labored beside him in the field from dawn to dark, than would new strange crops, which had frequently failed to repay the actual cost of seed, and whose culture had only sucked him deeper into the bog of debt. The Negro tenants and farmers, feeling themselves deceived by man and abandoned by God, gave up the struggle and crowded into near-by towns, where business was bankrupt and where ten men stood waiting for every job.
By the fall of 1922 many of the bankers and supply-merchants who had preached most loudly, ‘Diversify,’ seeing their farm-paper mount constantly higher and higher, changed their advice and frantically cried to the farmer that now the only hope lay in planting once more a bumper cottoncrop and in trusting to luck that an abnormally dry season might hold the boll weevil in check. Faced by a condition, and having tried out a theory, and apparently guessed wrong the first time, they now deemed a gambler’s chance to be sound business policy.
These men, it must be recalled, had lived well and prospered under the old one-crop system, even though it had held three fourths of the agricultural population in economic serfdom. Only so long as the change seemed necessary for their own financial safety did they, as a class, hearken readily to the altruistic arguments of those who sought to better average conditions through a better-balanced system of farming.
Fifty years ago Henry W. Grady, with prophetic understanding, pointed out to his people the way up from things that hindered their civilization. ‘When every farmer in the South shall eat bread from his own fields and meat from his own pasture, and, disturbed by no creditor and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teeming gardens and orchards and vineyards and dairies and barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom and growing them in independence, making cotton his clean surplus and selling it in his own time and in his chosen market and not at a master’s bidding, — getting his pay in cash and not in a receipted mortgage that discharges his debt but does not restore his freedom, — then shall be the breaking of the fullness of our day.’ But not until fifty years after, when boll weevil and trade stagnation combined to render the raising of more cotton precarious to her commercial classes, did the South freely pass these words on to her farmers as a watchword and a slogan.
At present the South is split into two camps — torn between the permanent benefits of diversified farming on the one hand and the lure of high-priced cotton on the other. In the one camp we find the chauvinists, — land-barons, town farmers, bankers, factors, supply-merchants, cotton exporters,— all with eyes glued to a past that favored their own oligarchical rule; they seek vainly after every new nostrum to wipe out the weevil and restore old conditions. Their cry is that, unless she can devise some method of producing more cotton, the South will lose her place of world supremacy, and the industry will be developed in the vast semitropical possessions of France and England. The other or modernist camp includes many of the more openminded and progressive white farmers, the graduates and teachers of the agricultural colleges, the workers of the various extension services, as well as able editors and journalists in every state. ‘Far better,’ say these, ‘that our mills import a portion of their cotton from other lands than that our farmers continue to import their meat, their hay, their vegetables, and even their cheese, butter, and milk. Restore again credit and prosperity, but build this time on the sound and lasting basis of well-balanced, self-supporting farms.’
In that older South the Negro found an ideal home and congenial occupation. Cotton brought him to America; and so long as the large cotton-plantation existed, he was content to jog along in a shiftless, servile status but a step removed from actual bondage. But there is no place for such a class either in the new scientific warfare required to grow cotton under bollweevil conditions or in the intensive struggle which it takes to bring to success a modern diversified farm.
This in outline is the agricultural upheaval in the South to-day, which is casting forth tens of thousands of Negroes to distant corners of the nation. Coexistent with these conditions comes the shortage of unskilled labor in the North and West, brought about by restrictions upon European immigration and, at the same time, a revival of industrial activity.
II
Besides the foregoing, which I might term a combination of agricultural and economic causes, I shall now mention as contributing factors certain less obvious things. There exists a universal belief among Negroes that their race can enjoy greater liberty in certain phases of existence in Northern states, and that there it is less subject to danger from the dreaded Ku Klux and other forms of mob violence. The Southerner will tell you, and he believes it, that the Negro looks upon his white neighbor in the South as his best friend. But the mind of Africa is of the East — inscrutable. The blue-clad soldiers who once came, bringing freedom, and then marched back to the Promised Land are fresh in the memory of a silent people. When out of the North came the call of higher wages and of better living-conditions, the younger men answered, for they remembered tales told long ago.
Again, for the past thirty years there has been a constant increase in the number of schools for colored children — all crowded to capacity. The effect of this wide spread of elementary education is seen for the first time in this present generation. It is marked by more initiative, a quicker comprehension of changing conditions, and a greater willingness to embrace new opportunities. Likewise experiences gained during the World War have rendered many colored men, who are leaders in their communities, discontented with local conditions, and have also familiarized them with the ease of transportation from one part of the country to another.
Negroes, being an emotional folk, love to follow the crowd and are easily swayed by power of suggestion. At the most important times of planting or harvest, the fields for miles may be deserted on a certain day because the entire countryside has suddenly left to attend a funeral or a ‘meeting.’ When a colored man tells you, ‘I got to go off,’ the malady is at once recognized as fatal. No details are ever given, but the words are final, and one realizes that soon the speaker will vanish to parts unknown and that, for a time, the place that has known him will know him no more. No argument, no reasoning will prevail — the call has come. So it is that now the racial fancy has been caught with enthusiasm for ‘goin’ up No’th.’
Every factor that I have mentioned seems destined to be a more or less permanent one. Certainly bygone conditions will never return, and so it is fair to assume that the movement which we see is but a beginning. There may be temporary breaks and pauses, but the tide has set.
Inquiring into the possible effects upon the South of the migration, I can see no eventual injury. The Negro has never played any part in Southern industrialism; the old system of cottongrowing, where he seems to have been essential, will soon be as dead as indigo culture on the coasts of Carolina; in those new methods of scientific and intensive farming which constitute the one hope of the agricultural South he has shown neither willingness nor aptitude to assume a share. Should his exodus continue to the point where his numbers show a marked decrease, the result may be a beneficial influx of white immigration into the Southern states — something that has not occurred for a century.
However, those vast humid plains of the South Atlantic and Gulf states are destined to remain forever the home of the bulk of the African race in America. There, climate and the ease with which an existence may be wheedled out of Nature most nearly resemble conditions in his ancient land, and it is there that the race shows the greatest increase despite the constant trickle to other sections. In the North his numbers can be maintained only by accretions from the Black Belt. Recent statistics compiled by Dr. Walter F. Wilcox of Cornell University show an amazing preponderance of Negro deaths over births in the colder states. In New England the ratio is 135 deaths to 100 births, in New York City 16 deaths to six births, and in the state of Minnesota 65 deaths to one birth. While these may be rather extreme instances and may be also somewhat discounted by the large proportion of male immigrants, they are still sufficient to indicate that the mass of the Negro race will never concentrate very far north.
Yet, owing to the several causes into which we have inquired, it is equally evident that from now on there will be an ever greater leaven of color spread through the hitherto all-white states. One effect of closer acquaintance and a better knowledge of the differences and peculiarities of the newcomers may be to win for the South a keener sympathy in her efforts to adjust social and political tensions caused by her vast black populations. At the same time the presence of more Negro votes in the North will tend to render more remote any possibility of change in the status of those Negro citizens who remain in the South.
Those who take part in any voluntary race-movement are the able, the energetic, the more efficient. This fact is bound to have an effect upon that quasi-caste system that now maintains in the Southern states, upheld by local custom and the authority of individual state legislation. Everywhere one finds separate schools, churches, fraternal orders, hotels, railway waiting-rooms, street-car and railway accommodations. In politics, the white race alone votes, holds office, and does jury duty. By the constant weeding-out through emigration of the more enterprising and intelligent members of the Negro race, the only source from which leaders might in time have been developed, this caste system will continue, become more firmly rooted, and, in the end, be accepted by the nation at large as a thing accomplished.
As a matter of fact, the more completely such conditions obtain, the less friction does one observe in interracial relations. As an example of this, in the city of Charleston the population is about equally divided between the two races, and in that city all rules of caste and class are most rigidly enforced. Yet, in spite of the enormous Negro population, riots are unknown and the city is without a single case of lynching in all its long history. Nearly all reports of race troubles come from places where the rules of caste-living are not well defined. I do not suggest this caste system as the final solution of the racial problem in America. I mention it as the best working solution so far devised, not in theory where the Negro does not live, but in practice where he is found in the greatest numbers.
III
Many writers and politicians in the past who have dealt with race questions in America have drawn up in grim array the difficulties and obstacles presented by the situation, and then, being unable themselves to find any way out from the maze of conflicting rights and interests that their investigations have exposed, have pessimistically declared the whole matter to be one incapable of any solution whatsoever. Such an attitude is too frequent with individual beings, who can see but a part and experience but a brief moment of that slow forward process by which humanity ascends. One becomes too prone to grow impatient with the exceeding slow grinding of the mills. But viewing in retrospect the vista of completed things down past centuries, it is easier to read into human events the writing of the Divine Wisdom, and to catch a vision of that onward sweep that some term Evolution and others know as God.
For some still unfathomable purpose a portion of the Negro race was transported from Africa, the stagnant land of yesterday, to America, the active land of to-morrow. Those human agents by whom this work was accomplished regarded their actions as destined to promote solely their own welfare and that of the sons who should follow them.
But reviewing now the two centuries that have dropped into the void of Time since the first slaves came, the lasting benefits seem entirely those which have come to the black man. The swamps along the tidal rivers of Georgia and the Carolinas, reclaimed by the toil and blood of Africa, have been gathered back into the lonely arms of the forest, mighty canals dug under urge of whip and lash are filled and overgrown with trees, the banks and levees of innumerable rice-fields are covered by each rising tide. Every vestige of the luxurious culture founded on slave labor has crept back into the twilight of forgotten things. The onlybenefit to be seen to-day from the fact that human slavery long flourished in many parts of the United States is the elevation of the former subject-race. Compare the American Negro’s wealth, education, and moral status, not with the white man’s, but with his own fifty, a hundred years ago — after all, but a moment in the life of a people. Already sufficient has been unfolded to convince the impartial observer that it is the Negro who is to garner from the harvest that was sown.
Local outbursts of race hatred, of ignorance, or of blind intolerance can never really hinder the steady march of great purposes; but the dawn of a clearer day may be hastened by a more general acceptance of the fact that principles of truth and justice are universal in their application.
Viewed strictly from a racial standpoint, a more general diffusion of the Negro race throughout the states of the Union is a movement, if continued, destined to bring appreciably nearer the ultimate solution of questions that at times have threatened to clog the wheels of our Great Experiment in democracy; viewed from another angle, one purely economic, it presents to my mind a more serious aspect. One may here consider it as but another instance of the inability of agricultural sections to retain labor permanently, through ups and downs, against the greater emoluments offered by other sections dominated by the intensive organization of modern industrialism.
In other countries, notably England, a similar difficulty is being encountered, and there, in the urge for mass production of machine-made things, farms are being denuded and rural life relegated to an inferior plane. The closer linking into one of the whole earth but increases the danger, by flooding industrial nations with cheap farm-products from distant lands having lower living-standards.
Such current tendencies cause some to question seriously the ability of agriculture as a calling to maintain its ancient station of dignity and worthiness — whether it can continue to offer an attractive field for ambition and to labor an adequate reward.