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234 THE CRISIS

want to be protected against lynching and personal abuse; they want better treatment on the farms, on the common carriers, and in public places in general.

A colored rural school paper, the Fort Valley (Ga.) Uplift, states:

Many Negroes also desire to go north with the hope of having better school facilities for their children. It is a fact, acknowledged by practically all well-informed men, that the public schools for Negroes, especially in the country districts where the great masses of Negroes live, with very rare exceptions, amount to practically nothing. Indeed, we have more than once heard intelligent men express the belief that the little money expended on them was wasted. A letter received by the principal of this institution a few days ago may give some light on this phase of the question. A farmer from a nearby county wrote: "We want you to please recommend a good teacher for our school. We has a good school with about fifty pupils and wants a good teacher." The principal replied asking him to state what salary would be paid and what the teacher would be charged for board. He replied promptly, saying: "I saw the superintendent last night and he tole me that the wagers of all the teachers had been cut from $16.80 to $14.40 a month." When we remember that the teacher must pay board out of this salary, we can easily surmise just about the kind of a teacher they will get. It must be remembered, too, that $14.40 per month is the only expenditure of any kind that the public school authorities will make for the fifty children who will attend this school for about four months in each year and for twenty-five to fifty others in the same districts who will not attend at all.

But the real reasons of the exodus are even deeper and more fundamental than this. The ancient gentleman who, under the pseudonym of Savoyard, is the Washington correspondent of several white southern papers, writes:

Your northern mana can never be made to understand the good-fellowship and affection that exists between the southern white and the Negro.

Perhaps the following extract from a Southe Carolina colored paper, the Pee Dee Watchman, may enlighten both Savoyard and his northern friends:

The first great shock and disturbance of the Negro's content in the South came when the suffrage was rudely and violently taken from him, his political rights absolutely destroyed and his civil and personal rights menaced and in great measure restricted and repressed. 

Thousands desired to leave but could find no haven, no place where the demand for Negro labor was greater than the supply;  in consequence, thereof, the movement of Negroes from the South to other parts of the country has been only a sort of drift of those who, from time to time, secured employment for themselves and their friends. With no hopeful future beckoning to them from other sections of the country, they settled down in the hope that following disenfranchisement and Jim Crow car laws, there would be a period to discrimination in the dispensation of justice and discrimination everywhere where life is made easier for the white man and harder for the Negro.

The passage of years, however, has not brought to the Negro the realization of his hopes.

Fifty years from slavery finds the lines of oppression and restriction drawn tighter and tighter around the helpless Negro. Ku Klux murders and terrorism during the early days of Reconstruction was followed by political murders after Reconstruction, when the Negro no longer strove for political freedom and no excuse existed for violence. On that score mob law began its reign and the lynching of Negroes has become so common and usual that the lynching of a Negro by a mob no longer excites comment or even a passing notice. In many communities in the Southern States the punishment of Negroes by mobs is regarded as entirely proper and not a sufficient violation of law for sworn officers of the law to endeavour to apprehend the members of the mob and bring them before the bar of justice.

In candid and tragic truth it must be said that there is in the South no protection for the life or person of a Negro against the intent of the bloody-minded and lawless white man.

Even some southern white papers acknowledge the manifest reasons for the exodus. The Birmingham, Ala., Ledger says:

There is just one other thing: Treatment of the Negro by petty law officers. The shameful manner in which Negroes are handled by them is one of the most disgraceful things in the Southeland. That the Negro resents this and would resent it more if he could, we know. That he will do the next best thing, go elsewhere if equal or greater opportunities for employment and freedom from wanton arrest invite him, we see taking place on a broad scale throughout the South.

Nevertheless, the Tuskegee farmers; conference declared:

"We recognize and appreciate the opportunities offered in the North to our people and the necessity which is compelling many of them to go there. Right here in the South, however, are great and permanent opportunities for the masses of our people," and then they proceeded to point out to the Negro farmer the facts that the South was just entering upon the greatest era of its development; that the Negro had gained a footing upon its soil here which it would be folly to relinquish; that the South

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THE LOOKING GLASS 235

is the only section right now where a little land can be bought on practically self-imposed terms and for a small outlay.

The reception of Negroes in various parts of the North is interesting. The Springfield, Ohio, News says:

The Negroes who came north last fall are for the most part law-abiding. They compare favorably in every respect with the native Negro.

The Chicago Daily News reports that:

In the industrial field the colored population has has invaded the labor market with a rush. Men and women of the race are being employed by thousands in business plants where a few years ago a colored person would not be admitted even as a visitor. To organized labor the growing problem of colored help is a disquieting augury of future storms. Chicago is one of the few cities in the United States where the colored man is not admitted to the trade unions, even though he may have a union card from some other city. Out of the union he is eligible as a strike breaker, and once he has shoved his foot over the "employes' entrance," the colored man often remains, even after the strike is settled.

A curious comment comes from the Hurtsboro, Ga., Tribune:

Instead of Hurtsboro being injured commercially by the exodus of colored it is the beneficiary, according to the records at the local banks and the postoffice.

More than 500 Negroes who formerly did their trading in Hurtsboro are at work in various parts of the country and, it is said, are drawing good pay for their labors. It is conservatively estimated that at least 400 of the Negroes send weekly remittances to their families left at home. The average remittance is about five dollars, making a total of about $2,000 that is spent each week with local merchants.

Hurtsboro bankers say they are handling checks of all sizes sent to Hurtsboro by Negroes. "It is an every day occurrence for us to cash these checks," stated the cashier of one of the banks.

The postoffice is doing a big business in the money order department. These orders come so fast it is impossible for the postoffice officials to keep sufficient cash on hand to handle them. Often it is necessary to go to a bank and secure the necessary cash.

REDUCING REPRESENTATION

The introduction into Congress of a proposal to "make thorough inquiry into the laws governing the elections in the several states of the Union" has led to renewed discussion on the reduction of southern representation. Even the New York Times acknowledges that:

The South most certainly does possess an unfair advantage in having its non-voters counted as voters, so that a handful of Southerners are more potent than a great number of Northerners. It is one of the many inequalities in our patchwork system with which we have put up for the sake of peace and the interests of the nation as a whole.

The Brooklyn Standard-Union says:

In at least eleven of the Southern States there is no such thing as a government by the majority of the people on all national and many local questions. The Negro vote, although a native American vote, is entirely suppressed in these states, and one existing amendment to the Federal Constitution, the Fourteenth, is a dead letter.

The Wheeling, W. Va., Intelligencer states:

In the recent election the eleven states constituting the Solid South cast a total popular vote amounting to 1,563,939, while the State of New York alone cast 56,000 more, or 1,619,997, but the latter only delivered 45 electoral votes to 126 of the Southern States. Is that fair? Is it strictly legal? This is something that concerns the whole country and not the individual whims of the Southern Democracy which suppresses the Negro vote for its own advantage and the disadvantage of the North.

From the Newark, N.J., Evening Star:

The explanation of the preposterous method which gives Louisiana, for instance, an electro for every 7,700 voters, and Kansas one for every 59,200, is found in the fact that electoral votes are apportioned on the basis of congressional representation, each state having as many electros as it has members of the two houses of Congress.

But congressmen are apportioned according to total population and not according to the number of voters. And so it comes about that the South, with its immense nonvoting population of Negroes, deprived of the ballot by "grandfather clauses" in constitutions or by other ways of evading the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal organic law possesses vastly more than its fair share in determining the Presidency.

And on the same basis of argument the South has too much voice in national legislation.

The Des Moines, Iowa, Capital adds:

This country has continued this injustice for over fifty years.

You can make a campaign in Dakota or Nebraska or in Montana or Kansas, but you cannot make a campaign in the Solid South, in the Confederate States, as they were. One of two things ought to be done. These Southern States ought to be deprived of a large number of electoral votes. They have disfranchised the Negro by one process or another; yet the Negro is counted as a voter and a man in the distribution of members of Congress and members of the electoral college. The South ought not to have the