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gration was too sudden it inconvenienced the South in some districts by displacing labor which could not be as suddenly replaced, and it was a detriment to the Negroes by reason of the overcrowding of the houses in centers to which they migrated, and the inability of so many newcomers to adjust themselves to their new environment. The riots in Chicago, Washington, St. Louis, and elsewhere grew out of conditions made by a too sudden influx of the Negro population.

Aside from the inconvenience growing out of the loss of Negro laborers in a few sections of the South, the Southern states have lost nothing by the Negro migration. In spite of the number of Negroes who left the South during 1910-20, the South had a larger Negro population in 1920 than in 1910 by 162,632. And as an offset to the departure of 330,260 Negroes, the South gained in foreign white stock 313,947,19 and in total white population 3,584,759.

So far as agriculture is concerned, the shortage of Negro labor in the few sections where there has been a shortage, has had the effect of doing away with the one-crop system in favor of smaller farms and more diversified cultivation. The transition to more diversified and intensive farming is bringing larger returns per acre, and tending to keep in the country the young white men who heretofore have been migrating to other sections.

So far as domestic service is concerned, the South would be better off without the Negro or other domestic class just as the West is better off without such a class. In the West every member of a family is habituated to domestic work and, by means of up-to-date kitchen and other household equipment, the people live on a high standard and save millions of dollars which the Southern people throw away on servants. The departure of the Negro would raise the wages of all labor, and give the South a laboring class living on high standards and forming an assimilable element of citizenship. If the Negroes were out of the way, the South would have the same chance to get white labor as any other section of the country. A Southern man, or Northern man for that matter, can hardly be found who would not admit that the South, or any other section, would be better off with a population all white. But while the Southern people realize this fact, they are not anxious to see the change come about. They are adjusted to the state of things which exists, and, upon the whole, they like the Negro.

As for the effects upon the Negro of his migration to the North, they may be looked at from two points of view.

19 Census 1920, Vol. 2, p. 902.

From the standpoint of physical vitality the movement of the Negro towards the cities of the North might be regarded as a very great mistake for the reason that away from the South Negroes die faster than they are born. Perhaps Booker T. Washington had this fact in mind when he urged the Negro to remain in the country and not rush off to the cities. Is not the city too much of a lure for the Negro and is he not facing extinction by yielding to it? But assuming that the Negro cannot survive in the cities of the North, is that a sufficient reason why he should tarry forever in the country? Is it not a fact that what we call the best class of white people, i. e., those of wealth and culture, who mostly dwell in the big cities, are tending toward extinction because of the decline in their birth-rate? And yet do they not continue to drift toward the great cities?

From the standpoint of the cultural advance of the Negro, there are reasons for thinking that his migration to the great cities is an immense gain. If Dr. DuBois is right in his view that the salvation of the Negro, or any race, is to be found only in its exceptional men, the "Talented Tenth" who serve as guides to the masses, then the great city must be for the Negro, as for the white man, an important factor in furnishing the opportunity and inspiration for distinguished leadership.

The general drift of population toward the great centers, and the rapid rise in standards of living in consequence of it, are raising many difficult social problems; until the white man has solved them he should be a little charitable with the Negro for his not solving them.

PART SIX

THE NEGRO IN LITERATURE AND ART

CHAPTER 36

WRITINGS OF NORTHERN WHITES

References to the Negro by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper-The Anti-slavery Poetry of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman-Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin-Olmsted's Journeys through the South-Sociological Studies of the Negro

IN

N attempting to indicate the extent to which the Negro has influenced the literature of the Caucasians in the United States, it is difficult to know what to include or leave out. Beside the poems and novels with Negro themes, we have hundreds of pamphlets, thousands of magazine articles, hundreds of thousands of newspaper stories, and whole libraries of histories and government documents. The tons of paper used up in writings about the Negro would pretty nearly fill all of the freight cars in the United States, and the floods of ink used upon the paper would form a lake of sufficient magnitude to immerse a large proportion of the Caucasian population of the earth.

Within the limits of a single chapter I can only refer briefly to some of the publications which have survived and taken rank as literature as distinguished from history, economies, and polemics.

Among the earliest nineteenth century writers to portray the Negro were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. The former gives us many picturesque and humorous sketches of Negro life, and the latter in his Satanstoe gives us a realistic account of the annual festival held by the Negroes of New York in Colonial times, and known as Pinkster. Incidentally Cooper throws an interesting sidelight on Negro superstitions.

When the slavery controversy arose in the United States, John Greenleaf Whittier came to be famous as an anti-slavery poet. He set to meter all phases of slavery from the slave ship to the slave's death. The following lines are from "The Slave Ships":

"Gloomily stood the captain,

With his arms upon his breast,

With his cold brow sternly knotted,

And his iron lip compressed.

'Are all the dead ones over?'

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