ountry. It is altogether unfair that the southern States
should enforce laws prohibiting the moving of labor from their
borders, when there are railroads all over this country that
would pay good wages to these laborers. I know of one railroad
company last year, which never had a colored man in the
service, that was offering large wages and scouring every
place for colored help. At the same time the South had and
still has a surplus of colored labor and would not permit it
to be moved. These conditions actually exist, and I know it.
I am interested in this thing not alone from the personal side
of it, but due to the fact of my association with the Erie
Railroad. I believe that the best thing that this body can
do, in my judgment, is to pass resolutions demanding that the
United States Emigration Bureau carry out the act passed by
Congress empowering the Labor Department to place unoccupied
men of other parts of the country where labor is needed.[57]

Early in the summer of 1916, the Pennsylvania and Erie Railroads
promiscuously picked up trainloads of negroes from Jacksonville, St.
Augustine and Pensacola, Florida. They were at first grouped in camps.
The promise of a long free ride to the North met with instant favor,
and wild excitement ensued as the news circulated. Carloads of negroes
began to pour into Pennsylvania. When they had once touched northern
soil and discovered that still higher wages were being offered by
other concerns, many deserted the companies responsible for their
presence in the North. Some drifted to the steel works of the same
State; others left for points nearby. Letters written home brought
news of still more enticing fields, and succeeded in stimulating
the movement. Of the 12,000 negroes brought into Pennsylvania by the
Pennsylvania Railroad, less than 2,000 remained with the company.[58]

It will no doubt be interesting to know exactly where these
negroes settled in the North. For the purpose of understanding this
distribution the North may well be divided according to the two main
lines followed by the migrants in leaving the South. The South and
middle Atlantic States sent the majority of their migrants directly up
the Atlantic coast while the south central States fed the Northwest.
There is, of course, no hard line of separation for these two streams.
Laborers were sought in fields most accessible to the centers
of industry, b