III
THE NEGRO MIGRATION
At Michigan avenue and East 31st street comes along the street a colored woman and three of her children. Two months ago they lived in Alabama, in a two room hut with a dirt floor and no running water and none of the things known as "conveniences." Barefooted and bareheaded, the children walk along with the mother, casually glancing at Michigan avenue's moving line of motor cars. Suddenly, as in a movie play, a big limousine swings to the curb. A colored man steps out, touches his hat to the mother and children and gives them the surprise of their lives. This is what he says:
"We don't do this up here. It isn't good for us colored folks to send our children out on the streets like this. We're all working together to do the best we can. One thing we're particular about is the way we take the little ones out on the streets.
"They ought to look as if they're washed clean all over. And they ought to have shoes and stockings and hats and clean shirts on. Now you go home and see to that. If you haven't got the money to do it, come and see me. Here's my card."
He gives her the card of a banker and real estate man at an office where they collect rent monthly from over 1,000 tenants, and where they hold titles in fee simple to the rented properties.
This little incident gives some idea of the task of assimilation Chicago took in the last five years in handling the more than 70,000 colored people who came here in that time, mostly from southern states.
A big brown stone residence in Wabash avenue, of the type that used to be known as "mansions," housed five families from Alabama. They threw their dinner leavings from the back porch. And one night they sat on the front steps and ate watermelon and threw the rinds out past the curbstone. In effect, they thought they were going to live in the packed human metropolis of Chicago just as they had lived "down in Alabam'."
Now they have learned what garbage cans are for. From all sides the organized and intelligent forces of the colored people have hammered home the suggestion that every mistake of one colored man or woman may result in casting a reflection on the whole group. The theory is, "Be clean for your own sake, but remember that every good thing you do goes to the credit of all of us."
It must not be assumed, of course, that the types thus far mentioned are representative of all who come from Alabama or other states of the south. Among the recent arrivals, for example, are a banker, the managing editor of a weekly newspaper, a manual training instructor in the public schools and several men who have made successes in business. It is possible now for Chicago white people to come into contact with colored men who have had years of experience in direct co-operation with Tuskegee and Hampton institutes and with the workings in southern states of the theories of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and others. The application of these theories is being continued in Chicago.
Willis N. Huggins, an intensely earnest and active worker for the interests of the colored people, is an instructor in manual training at the Wendell Phillips high school. He came from Alabama in 1917.
"I was making a social survey of the northern counties of Alabama through the financial aid of Mrs. Emmons Blaine of Chicago," he said to me. "My work was discontinued because our information collected in that territory would be useless. About one-fourth of the colored people migrated to the north.
"There were 12,000 colored people in Decatur, Ala., before the war. The migration took away 4,000, judging by a house to house canvas I made in various sections of that one city. When they took the notion they just went. You could see hundreds of houses where mattresses, beds, wash bowls and pans were thrown around the back yard after the people got throu^ picking out w'hat they wanted to take along.
"All the railroad trains from big territory farther south came on through Decatur. Some days five and six of these trains came along. The colored people in Decatur would go to the railroad station and talk with these other people about where they were going. And when the moving fever hit them there was no changing their minds.
"Take Huntsville, only a few miles from Decatur, on a branch line. There they didn't see these twelve coach trains coming through loaded with emigrants. So from Huntsville there was not much emigration.
"In many localities the educated negroes came right along with their people. I rode in September, 1917, with a minister from Monroe, La. This was his second trip. He had been to Boston and organized a church with 100 members of his Louisiana congregation. Now he was taking fifty, all in one coach. I hear that later he made a third trip and has now moved the whole of his original congregation of 300 members up to Boston. He told me that the first group he took to Boston were all naturally inclined to go. The second group made up their minds more slowly. He said that probably they would not have gone at all if it had not been for fears of lynching. A series of lynchings in Texas at that time gave him examples from which to argue that the north was safer for colored people.
"With many who have come north, the attraction of wages and employment is secondary to the feeling that they are going where there are no lynchings. Others say that while they know they would never be lynched in the south and they are not afraid on that score, they do want to go where they are sure there is more equality and opportunity than in the south. The schools in the north are an attraction to others.
"I make these observations from having personally talked with my people in Madison county, Alabama, where there were 10,000 negroes, of whom 5,000 came north in two years."