The Negro in Chicago - A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago Commission on Race Relations
condemned in no uncertain words by the Governor, other high officials and the press in general of South Carolina. Officials pledged that the lynchers would be punished. The case went to the grand jury. Mr. Crawford was lynched in the daytime and dragged through the streets by unmasked men. The names of the leaders were supposed to have been known, and yet the grand jury, under oath, says that it could not find sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment. …
Is any one surprised that Negroes are leaving South Carolina by the thousands? The wonder is that any of them remain. They will suffer in the North. Some of them will die. But Anthony Crawford did not get a chance to die in Abbeville, South Carolina. He was shamefully murdered. Any place would be paradise compared with some sections of the South where the Negroes receive such maltreatment.
From the Savannah (Georgia) Morning News (white), January 3, 1917:
Another cause is the feeling of insecurity. The lack of legal protection in the country is a constant nightmare to the colored people who are trying to accumulate a comfortable little home and farm. There is scarcely a Negro mother in the country who does not live in dread and fear that her husband or son may come in unfriendly contact with some white person as to bring the lynchers or the arresting officers to her door which may result in the wiping out of her entire family. It must be acknowledged that this is a sad condition. …
The Southern white man ought to be willing to give the Negro a man's chance without regard to his race or color, give him at least the same protection of law given to anyone else. If he will not do this, the Negro must seek those North or West, who will give him better wages and better treatment. I hope, however, that this will not be necessary.
Injustice in the courts.—An excerpt from one of the newspapers of that period illustrates the basis of this cause:
While our very solvency is being sucked out from underneath we go out about affairs as usual—our police officers raid poolrooms for "loafing Negroes," bring in twelve, keep them in the barracks all night, and next morning find that many of them have steady, regular jobs, valuable assets to their white employers, suddenly left and gone to Cleveland, "where they don't arrest fifty niggers for what three of 'em done" [Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser (white), September 21, 1916].
Inferior transportation facilities.—This refers to "Jim Crow cars," a partitioned section of one railway car, usually the baggage car, and partitioned sections of railway waiting-rooms, poorly kept, bearing signs, "For colored only." This dissatisfaction is expressed in part in the following comment of a Negro presiding elder, writing in the Macon (Georgia) Ledger, a white paper:
The petty offenses, which you mention, are far more numerous than you are aware of, besides other unjust treatments enacted daily on the streets, street cars and trains. Our women are inhumanly treated by some conductors, both on the street cars and trains. White men are often found in compartments for Negroes smoking, and if anything is said against it they who speak are insulted, or the car is purposely filled with big puffs of smoke and the conductor's reply is, "He'll quit to-rectly." Recently a white man entered a trailer for Negroes with two little dogs. One of the dogs went between the seats and crouched by a woman; she pushed him from her and the white man took both dogs and set them aside her and she was forced to ride with them. This is one of the many, many acts of injustice which often result in a row for which the Negro has to pay the penalty. These things are driving the Negro from the South.
Other causes stated are (a) the deprivation of the right to vote, (b) the "rough-handed" and unfair competition of "poor whites," (c) persecution by petty officers of the law, and (d) the "persecution of the Press."
III. BEGINNING AND SPREAD OF MIGRATION
The enormous proportions to which the exodus grew obscure its beginning. Several experiments had been tried with southern labor in the Northeast, particularly in the Connecticut tobacco fields and in Pennsylvania. In Connecticut, Negro students from the southern schools had been employed during summers with great success. Early in 1916, industries in Pennsylvania imported many Negroes from Georgia and Florida. During July one railroad company stated that it had brought to Pennsylvania more than 13,000 Negroes. They wrote back for their friends and families, and from the points to which they had been brought they spread out into new and "labor slack" territories. Once begun, this means of recruiting labor was used by hard-pressed industries in other sections of the North. The reports of high wages, of the unexpected welcome of the North, and of unusually good treatment accorded Negroes spread throughout the South from Georgia and Florida to Texas.
The stimuli of suggestion and hysteria gave the migration an almost religious significance, and it became a mass movement. Letters, rumors, Negro newspapers, gossip, and other forms of social control operated to add volume and enthusiasm to the exodus. Songs and poems of the period characterized the migration as the "Flight Out of Egypt," "Bound for the Promised Land," "Going into Canaan," "The Escape from Slavery," etc.
The first movement was from Southeast to Northeast, following main lines of transportation. Soon, however, it became known that the Middle West was similarly in need of men. Many industries advertised for southern Negroes in Negro papers. The federal Department of Labor for a period was instrumental in transporting Negroes from the South to relieve the labor shortage in other sections of the country, but discontinued such efforts when southern congressmen pointed out that the South's labor supply was being depleted. It was brought out in the East St. Louis riot inquiry that plants there had advertised in Texas newspapers for Negro laborers.
Chicago was the logical destination of Negroes from Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, because of the more direct railway lines, the way in which the city had become known in these sections through its two great mail-order houses, the Stock Yards, and the packing-plants with their numerous storage houses scattered in various towns and cities of the South. It was rumored in these sections that the Stock Yards needed 50,000 men; it was said that temporary housing was being provided by these hard-pressed industries. Many Negroes came to the city on free transportation, but by far the greater numbers paid their own fare. Club rates offered by the railroads brought the fare within reach of many who ordinarily could not have brought their families or even come themselves. The organization into clubs composed of from ten to fifty persons from the same community had the effect, on the one hand, of adding the stimulus of intimate persuasion to the movement, and, on the other hand, of concentrating solid groups in congested spots in Chicago.
A study of certain Negro periodicals shows a powerful influence on southern Negroes already in a state of unsettlement over news of the "opening up of the North."
The Chicago Defender became a "herald of glad tidings" to southern Negroes. Several cities attempted to prevent its circulation among their Negro population and confiscated the street- and store-sales supplies as fast as they came. Negroes then relied upon subscription copies delivered through the mails. There are reports of the clandestine circulation of copies of the paper in bundles of merchandise. A correspondent of the Defender wrote: "White people are paying more attention to the race in order to keep them in the South, but the Chicago Defender has emblazoned upon their minds 'Bound for the Promised Land.'"
In Gulfport, Mississippi, it was stated, a man was regarded "intelligent" if he read the Defender, and in Laurel, Mississippi, it was said that old men who had never known how to read, bought the paper simply because it was regarded as precious.[18]
Articles and headlines carrying this special appeal which appeared in the Defender are quoted:
Why Should the Negro Stay in the South?
WEST INDIANS LIVE NORTH
It is true the South is nice and warm, and may I add, so is China, and we find Chinamen living in the North, East, and West. So is Japan, but the Japanese are living everywhere.
SCHOOL BOARDS BAD
While in Arkansas a member of the