problem in its urban aspects the accompanying diagram
showing the increase in the Negro population of northern cities during the
first decade of this century will be helpful.

Some of these Negroes have migrated after careful consideration; others
have just happened to go north as wanderers; and a still larger number on
the many excursions to the cities conducted by railroads during the summer
months. Sometimes one excursion brings to Chicago two or three thousand
Negroes, two thirds of whom never go back. They do not often follow the
higher pursuits of labor in the North but they earn more money than they
have been accustomed to earn in the South. They are attracted also by the
liberal attitude of some whites, which, although not that of social
equality, gives the Negroes a liberty in northern centers which leads them
to think that they are citizens of the country.[25]

This shifting in the population has had an unusually significant effect on
the black belt. Frederick Douglass advised the Negroes in 1879 to remain
in the South where they would be in sufficiently large numbers to have
political power,[26] but they have gradually scattered from the black belt
so as to diminish greatly their chances ever to become the political force
they formerly were in this country. The Negroes once had this possibility
in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and, had
the process of Africanization prior to the Civil War had a few decades
longer to do its work, there would not have been any doubt as to the
ultimate preponderance of the Negroes in those commonwealths. The
tendencies of the black population according to the censuses of the United
States and especially that of 1910, however, show that the chances for the
control of these State governments by Negroes no longer exist except in
South Carolina and Mississippi.[27] It has been predicted, therefore,
that, if the same tendencies continue for the next fifty years, there will
be even few counties in which the Negroes will be in a majority. All of
the Southern States except Arkansas showed a proportionate increase of the
white population over that of the black between 1900 and 1910, while West
Virginia and Oklahoma with relatively small numbers of blacks showed, for
reasons stated elsewhere, an increase in the Negro population. Thus we see
coming to pass something like the proposed plan of Jefferson and other
statesmen who a hundred years ago advocated the exp