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The 369th Regiment fought in World War I

colored population of Georgia and Florida became excited. Farm hands who had driven their employers' teams into towns left their wagons in the streets, and caught outgoing labor trains. Sawmills that had a full corps of laborers when they stopped for the noon hour were deserted without notice, and when the operators investigated they found that their "hands" had gone "North" without a moment's notice. Every industry was affected. A half-dozen doctors in Jacksonville lost their drivers the first day of the "free ride" call.

The conditions in Georgia and Florida were duplicated in Alabama and Tennessee. Soon the movement spread to other States and is still spreading. Many of the first Negroes to migrate have written back and told of the glorious land beyond the Mason-Dixon line. John Suggs, a Florida Negro who was sojourning in Georgia when the labor agent got him, wrote back to a brother from Wheeling, West Virginia. We come here to work in the mines. We get 25 cents an hour, and gin and whiskey flow like water. I am going with a lot of Georgia Negroes to Pittsburgh Sunday. It don't cost much and I may not come back here. In Pittsburgh the coal and iron men are paying $2.50, $3 and, $3.50 a day. And here the people don't call you "nigger" but "mister." Every community from which the first batches of Negroes went is receiving similar letters and appeals. The laborers who went before and are doing well write back to their kith and kin. The higher wages of the North, East and West are being advertised in every Negro home of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.

This Negro movement was well under way before the white people of the South realized what it meant. Jacksonville, Birmingham and Savannah began to protest. The Department of Labor soon stopped its efforts to get the "manless job" of the North, East and West, and a "jobless man" from Florida, Georgia or Alabama. Senators Fletcher and Bryan took the matter up with Assistant Secretary Post of the Department of Labor. The Government agent at Jacksonville was instructed to desist. The city of Jacksonville passed an ordinance taxing all labor agents operating inside the corporate limits. The efforts to hold the Negroes served to advertise the movement, and some of the labor agents had "labor specials" stop just outside of the city limits and pick up the men who wanted to go "North." Negro preachers and Negro women were paid to urge the men to go North and get better wages. Pictures showing the homes of Negro men with white wives in Chicago and other Western communities were stealthily exhibited. The prospective recruit was told that in the North, East and West his children would go to school with white children and have ten months of school training each year. He was told that he could go to the "white" moving picture shows, and that he could sit anywhere in a streetcar or railroad train, as there are no "Jim Crow" laws outside of the South. All the seductive arguments known to cunning man have been used in Georgia and the neighboring states.

Courtesy of HARLEM ON MY MIND

[[image - black white photograph of an African American man in uniform; his right leg is missing]]

[[image - black white photograph of an African American man in uniform holding a framed picture]]
[[caption]] CORPORAL FRED McINTYRE, 1919[[/caption]]
Courtesy of HARLEM ON MY MIND