The Negro Moves North
by DAVID L. COHN
1
THE essential dilemma of the white South is this: the South must decide whether or not it wants to retain its Negro population or risk losing a large part of it by emigration to other sections of the country. If it wants to keep Negroes in the South, it must make many adjustments that will satisfy at least the more urgent demands of this clamant and highly race-conscious group. Otherwise it is reasonable to assume, both from the facts of the immediate past and from the present mood of Negroes, that they will leave the section in great numbers.
There are roughly 10 million Negroes in the region and 30 million whites, so that Negroes constitute a quarter of the total population. In some of the Southern states, the proportion is as high as a third or a half, while in certain counties of the deep South, there are three Negroes for every white.
By contrast, Negroes make up only 9.8 per cent of the total United States population; only 1.2 percent of the New England community; and only 4.8 per cent of a great Middle Western state such as Illinois.
Negroes are obviously an overwhelming fact in the economic life of the South. They are not only labor but they are cheap, ubiquitous labor that does the heavy work of the community and is, generally speaking, docile. Negroes hoe the corn, pick the cotton, sweat in the sawmills and cottonseed oil mills, and tamp the ties of the Yellow Dog railroad in the blazing Mississippi sun. Negro women are the classical and almost the only domestics of the area. They are the cooks, maids, children’s nurses, and washerwomen, whose low wage scale has made it possible for even the small-income Southern home to have one or more servants.
The South is a section of low-cost labor. Wages there are generally below those of the rest of the country. It has long maintained that, for various reasons, it could not compete with richer, more experienced, more highly industrialized sections of the nation if it had to pay the same wage scales; and, faced with uniform Federal wage legislation, it has sought wage differentials weighted in its favor.
At the risk of oversimplification and without taking into account various economic factors that have handicapped the South’s growth (some imposed from without and some stemming from conditions within), one may say that it is largely the presence of Negroes which has made possible the low wage scales of the South. Immigrants did not go South in considerable numbers before the Civil War, because they did not want to compete with slave labor; nor did they go there after the war, because they did not want to compete with low-wage free labor. The very abundance of Negroes made for a cheap labor market, while the fact that they could exist at an almost Oriental standard of living, and yet multiply, tended to perpetuate the system.
There are other considerations. The South has long been bitterly opposed to labor unions; when it has not prevented them from starting, it has tried to hamstring them. Here the Negro unwittingly has played a valuable role for the anti-unionists. Excluded from the white man’s unions, docile, accustomed to hard labor and a low standard of living, he has done much, by his mere presence, to prevent the growth of unionism — although by so doing he has injured both the white worker and himself. It is clear, therefore, that the emigration of considerable numbers of Negroes from the section would sharply change the situation of relative non-unionism and low wages which many Southern industrialists have sought to perpetuate on the ground that their industries could not otherwise exist.
It is equally clear that a great part of Southern industrial-agricultural productivity depends upon Negro labor. Negroes contribute enormously to the South’s annual production of wealth; consequently their emigration would work serious harm to the economic welfare of the area, retard its progress toward industrialization as an escape from the cotton-tobacco wheel upon which it has long suffered, and place it perhaps at a fatal disadvantage in competition with other sections of the nation. Negroes are both producers and consumers. As consumers they occupy an important place in the economic life of the South, for they buy products made there or imported and distributed by local merchants. Thousands of Southern merchants support themselves largely by the custom of Negroes, and these merchants in turn affect their communities as home owners and taxpayers.
Finally, although Negroes do not in general vote, they are counted as citizens for proportional representation in Congress; hence they give the South a political power which it would not have without them — a power which makes each white Southern voter the equal in strength of two or three voters elsewhere in the country.
Yet Negroes have long been leaving the South in great numbers and, unless there is a change in their situation, it is safe to assume that they will continue to leave at perhaps an accelerated rate after the war.
2
IT is madness to assume, as native fascists do, that 10 million Negroes will attempt to improve their lot by resort to arms. In a democracy such as ours, Negroes have the right to seek, and may seek, legislation that will put them on a parity with other citizens. But laws cannot be effective unless they are enacted with the consent of the community and are fairly administered with its approval; it is sufficient to cite in this respect the fate of the prohibition law. The status of the Southern Negro would seem, then, to lie in the hands of Southern whites generally rather than in the hands of legislators, whether Federal or state.
There remains the right or the weapon of emigration— the method employed by the hordes of immigrants who came here to escape oppression in their homelands or to improve their economic st at us. It is the age-old method of the poor, the obscure, the politically weak; a form, so to speak, of active non-resistance against which nothing avails except a removal of the grievances of which the emigrants complain.
This method has actually been employed by Southern Negroes for the past fifty years, but, for reasons which we shall examine, it has been intensified during the past twenty-five years and there is every reason to believe it. will be used more widely in the immediate future. To illustrate, the Negro population of Detroit increased from around 40,000 in 1920 to 149,000 in 1940; of Cleveland, from 34,000 to 84,000; of New York, from 152,000 to 458,000; of St. Louis, from 69,000 to 108,000.
The great modern movement of Negroes from the South began during the last war. Its effects were striking. By 1930, when Northern Negroes numbered some 2.4 millions, the loss to the South amounted to nearly 2 millions. This is more than 20 per cent of its Negro population and more than 5 per cent of its total population. The actual loss is even greater, since the Negroes who emigrated would have left their progeny in the area had they remained.
There were many reasons for the emigration, including a coincidence of three factors: the war had created a great demand for labor, the demand was intensified by the shutting off of European immigration, and the boll weevil struck heavily in the old South cotton areas. Labor agents, disguised as insurance men and salesmen, worked incessantly among Negroes on behalf of Northern industry. They promised unheard-of high wages, attractive living conditions, less unemployment, a shorter working day than on the farm, a Jim Crowless land where every Negro man was “Mr.” and every Negro woman was “Mrs.” to the white people, and better educational facilities.
Southern Negroes already in the North, and those who had recently gone, wrote glowing letters to their friends and relatives in the South urging them to come to the promised land, and the Northern Negro press chimed in. These were positive inducements that thousands could not resist. The Negro emigrants said they were leaving because of low wages, bad housing conditions on plantations, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment by law officers, and unfairness in t he courts, but many were moved by nothing more than a desire for travel. Others were swept from their moorings in a movement that became almost hysterical at times. Some Negroes were even advised by their white friends to leave areas where the crop outlook seemed hopeless.
There were three main streams of migration. The largest stream flowed from Georgia through the Atlantic coast states and terminated in New York and Pennsylvania. A second stream began in Mississippi and Alabama but split into three branches in Ohio — one going to Indiana and Illinois, another to Michigan, and a third remaining in Ohio. The third stream flowed from Louisiana through Arkansas and Missouri into Illinois.
Within a period of ninety days during the twenties, 12,000 Negroes left the cotton fields of Mississippi, and an average of two hundred were leaving Memphis every night. Georgia was especially hard hit. It is estimated that, between 1920 and 1923, its available labor supply was reduced by two fifths. The Macon Telegraph expressed the consternation of the white community: —
Everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses — that is, everybody but farmers who waked up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on their places gone — to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Indianapolis. It was a week following that several Macon employers found good Negroes, men trained in their work, . . . had suddenly left and gone to Cleveland.
The South did not willingly suffer the exodus, and attempted to stop it by repression and exhortation. Labor agents were beaten, jailed, or run out of the community. Negroes hanging around railroad stations were arrested on charges of vagrancy; sometimes migrants were taken from trains and jailed; and attempts were made to keep Nort hern Negro newspapers from reaching their Southern readers. Much of the Southern press denounced the industrial North in terms reminiscent of the antebellum struggle between slaveowners and abolitionists. It described the opportunities for Negroes in the South and the kindly relationships long existing between thousands of individual whites and Negroes. Sometimes picnics were held with free pop and hamburgers for Negroes, at which white and Negro speakers harangued the crowd on the advantages of the South as a home for colored people. Negro leaders told white leaders that Negroes would prefer to remain in the South if some of their grievances were removed.
None of these methods was successful. Negroes continued to leave the South until they were stopped by the stark facts of the economic depression of the 1930’s. Yet the urge to emigrate still apparently burns in the breast of Negroes. Time (June 19, 1914) reports as follows on conditions in Mississippi: —
Over all the black rich delta land of Mississippi, which produces 7% of the nation’s cotton crop, Southern whites last week were lifting their own loads, toting their own bales. In the hills, white women and small boys sweated behind the mules down the long hot rows of cotton and corn. . . . For Mississippi, which still has the nation’s second largest Negro population (1,074,578) was running short of Negroes.
Since 1940, when Mississippi whites outnumbered the Negroes for the first time in a century, an estimated 50,000 Negroes have left the state, headed north in the hope of better pay and a better life. . . . Mississippi, proud of its pleasant way of life which has depended for more than a century on Negro labor . . . fretted and fumed at doing the hard work.
Given the urge to emigrate, the rise of Negro race consciousness and Negro public opinion, the changing attitudes of younger Negroes who are better educated than their elders and more sharply aware of their rights, the provocative role of the Negro press and Negro leadership, it is obvious that Negro emigration from the South would now in all probability be progressing at a high rate if it were not for one transitory fact. That fact is the wartime freezing of labor by Federal fiat, which makes it difficult for workers to move capriciously from one area to another.
In the face of the hard reality, Southerners are likely to say, and with much truth, that the lot of t he Negro in the North is not a happy one — that in the North the Negro is the last to be hired and the first to be fired; that many of the repressions that run against him in the South also run against him in the North and are often more savage — untempered as they are by that complex mutuality of understanding and sympathy which so often prevails among Southern whites and Negroes; that Harlem is a cesspool of disease, filth, and crime where Negroes are unmercifully gouged by landlords and merchants; that many avenues of economic opportunity are closed to Negroes so that, unless they are in the professions, they are normally in demand only as domestics or as performers of heavy, dirty work which many whites reject. All these things may be true; yet they do not alter the situation. Southern Negroes, in my opinion, will continue to leave the South after the war so long as they believe they will be better off in the North.
This tendency poses a problem of grave importance for the South and for the nation. The status of the Southern Negro has improved enormously during the past fifty years. It is reasonable to assume that his status will continue to improve if the white man realizes (as he has so often done) that he has sinned against the Negro, and — equally important — if the Negro realizes that he himself has not always been free from sinning. He is not, despite the sentimentalists, a black saint in overalls, any more than the white man is a devil in a Sears, Roebuck suit. “A man might get to heaven,” a Negro preacher once told me, “but he ain’t nothin’ but meat down here.”
Yet when this has been said, the fact remains that since the whites are the masters of their community, and Negroes can effectively express their resentment over their grievances only by leaving the community, a positive program must be offered by the whites if they want Negroes to stay in the South. It is certain that they cannot retain Negroes entirely upon white terms; that over many areas of discontent they must make mutually satisfactory adjustments or be prepared to witness profound changes in their economic life and their way of living. The situation is one that demands for its successful solution not only good will on both sides, but the coolest calculation; a dangerous impasse will be reached if Negroes ask too much or if whites grant too little.
If any non-Southerner is complacent about this problem, let him wake up and take notice. It is one that concerns not only the South but the whole nation; the fate of 14 million people, or one tenth of the whole population, must affect the nation. If masses of Negroes go North, will the effect be that, while the South suffers severe economic dislocations (thereby affecting the nation), the Negro question will be transferred North? There are, for example, more Negroes on a single Mississippi cotton plantation than in all of Vermont. What would happen if the Negro population of Bellows Falls should increase from, say, five families to five hundred families? If thousands of Negroes should appear in the Northern labor market when that market was already approaching satiety or was overburdened, would these Negroes be welcomed by Northern white labor with bouquets or with brickbats? If, politically, the Northern population were increased by several million Negroes and they voted en bloc, would the destiny of the nation then rest perhaps in the hands of this minority during crucial, hotly contested national elections?
These are grave questions for which there are no glib, ready-made answers. It would be a rash nation that did not give them the earnest study their importance demands.