acute as they might have been because of the influence of Hampton and Tuskegee and of the other institutions like Howard,
Virginia Union, Atlanta, Fisk, Morehouse, Clark and Biddle
which have been exerting the same influence on the Negro race.
Negroes who went North were not all raw, unskilled laborers. Out of the industrial schools had come Negroes trained for the requirements of industry—blacksmiths, carpenters, brickmasons, plumbers, steam-fitters, auto-mechanics. When the opportunity came these men were ready for the test to which they were to be subjected. Though the great bulk of those who migrated had had no specific training in these lines, there were enough trained at Tuskegee and Hampton, and other industrial schools as well as in industrial plants in the South to make it feasible for Northern manufacturers to experiment with Negro mechanics. In all the industrial centers of the North and South graduates of these schools can be found, and it is a source of satisfaction that they have so far justified the experiment as to remove practically all doubt as to their availability for skilled work in whatever lines are open to them.
These laborers did not go alone, however, so broad was the current of migration that it carried along with it professional men and leaders in business and other lines of activity, trained in the schools of the South. Lawyers, doctors, dentists found it desirable to change their location to the new centers to which their clients had migrated. Even ministers, finding their congregations depleted by the movement, found it possible in not a few instances to establish churches in the North whose memberships were in a large measure composed of their former parishioners in the South.
The initial effect of this on the North was to create a housing problem. Residential sections inhabited formerly by whites were invaded by Negroes under the pressure of expanding population. One reaction to this was the riots in Washington, Chicago and Omaha. Not every city, however, witnessed such violent eruption; Springfield, Cleveland, Akron, Detroit, proceeded to absorb the influx of Negro population without apparent friction. This was nowhere better done than in New York City. Already densely populated, the metropolitan cen-
