as
a "fair" State, it received through Chicago as many at least as the
entire State of Pennsylvania. Chicago is the center of a cluster of
industrial towns. It has served as a point of distribution through
its numerous employment agencies for the territory northwest and
northeast. Michigan has one large city, Detroit, which has recently
increased its population one hundred per cent because of its number
of highly developed industries which have supplied employment for its
rapidly increasing population.[61]

The eastern cities which made efforts through various means to augment
their labor supply were Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, New York
City and Hartford. It is manifestly impossible to get reliable figures
on the volume of increase in the negro population of any of these
cities. All that is available is in the form of estimates which can
not be too confidently relied upon. Estimates based on the average
number of arrivals from the South per day, the increase in the school
population and the opinions of social agencies which have engaged
themselves in adjusting the newcomers to their new homes appear to
agree in the main.

[Footnote 55: These facts appear in the _United States Census
Reports_.]

[Footnote 56: _The New York News_.]

[Footnote 57: _New York Age_, January 30, 1917; _Christian Recorder_,
Philadelphia, February 2, 1917.]

[Footnote 58: Ibid.]

[Footnote 59: Fortune, _Report on Negro Migration to the East_.]

[Footnote 60: Ibid.]

[Footnote 61: These estimates are based upon the reports of
investigators sent to make a study of the condition of the migrants.]

CHAPTER VI

THE DRAINING OF THE BLACK BELT

In order better to understand the migration movement, a special study
of it was made for five adjoining States, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana, from which came more than half of all
migrants. The negro population of these five States was 4,115,299,
which was almost half of the negro population of the South. In the
particular sections of these States where the migration was the
heaviest, the one crop system, cotton, was general. As a result of
the cotton price demoralization resulting from the war, the labor
depression, the ravages of the cotton boll weevil, and in some regions
unusual floods, as already stated, there was in this section of the
South an exceptionally large amount of surplus labor. The several
trunk line railroads directly connecting this section