klahoma and Texas, pioneering Negro laborers
drifted into the industrial district of the Appalachian highland during
the eighties and nineties and the infiltration of the discontented
talented tenth affected largely the cities of the North. But now we are
told that at the very time the mining districts of the North and West are
being filled with blacks the western planters are supplying their farms
with them and that into some cities have gone sufficient skilled and
unskilled Negro workers to increase the black population more than one
hundred per cent. Places in the North, where the black population has not
only not increased but even decreased in recent years, are now receiving a
steady influx of Negroes. In fact, this is a nation-wide migration
affecting all parts and all conditions.

Students of social problems are now wondering whether the Negro can be
adjusted in the North. Many perplexing problems must arise. This movement
will produce results not unlike those already mentioned in the discussion
of other migrations, some of which we have evidence of today. There will
be an increase in race prejudice leading in some communities to actual
outbreaks as in Chester and Youngstown and probably to massacres like that
of East St. Louis, in which participated not only well-known citizens but
the local officers and the State militia. The Negroes in the North are in
competition with white men who consider them not only strike breakers but
a sort of inferior individuals unworthy of the consideration which white
men deserve. And this condition obtains even where Negroes have been
admitted to the trades unions.

Negroes in seeking new homes in the North, moreover, invade residential
districts hitherto exclusively white. There they encounter prejudice and
persecution until most whites thus disturbed move out determined to do
whatever they can to prevent their race from suffering from further
depreciation of property and the disturbance of their community life.
Lawlessness has followed, showing that violence may under certain
conditions develop among some classes anywhere rather than reserve itself
for vigilance committees of primitive communities. It has brought out too
another aspect of lawlessness in that it breaks out in the North where the
numbers of Negroes are still too small to serve as an excuse for the
terrorism and lynching considered necessary in the South to keep the
Negroes down.

The maltreatment of the Negroes