with the
northern industrial centers made the transportation of this labor an
easy matter.

In 1915, the labor depression in Georgia was critical and work at
remunerative wages was scarce. In Atlanta strong pressure was brought
to bear to have the negroes employed in cleaning the streets replaced
by whites who were out of work. It was reported that the organized
charities of Macon, in dealing with the question of the unemployed,
urged whites employing negroes to discharge the blacks and hire
whites. Mr. Bridges Smith, the mayor of the city, bitterly opposed
this suggestion. When the 1915 cotton crop began to ripen it was
proposed to compel the unemployed negroes in the towns to go to the
fields and pick cotton. Commenting editorially on this, the _Atlanta
Constitution_ said:

The problem of the unemployed in Albany, Georgia, is being
dealt with practically. All negroes who have not regular
employment are offered it in the cotton fields, the immense
crop requiring more labor than the plantations ordinarily
have. If the unemployed refuse the opportunity, the order
"move on" and out of the community is given by the chief of
police, and the order must be obeyed. Though the government is
taking up very systematically the problem of the unemployed,
its solving will be slow, and the government aid for a long
time will have to be supplementary to work in this direction,
initiated in communities, municipalities and States, where the
problem of the unemployed is usually complex.[62]

In the course of time, when the negroes did leave, they departed in
such large numbers that their going caused alarm. Because they left
at night the number of negroes going north from the immediate vicinity
was not generally realized. One night nearly fifty of Tifton boarded
northbound passenger trains, which already carried, it is said, some
three hundred negroes. Labor agents had been very active in that
section all fall, but so cleverly had they done their work that
officers had not been able to get a line on them. For several weeks,
the daily exodus, it is said, had ranged from ten to twenty-five.[63]

Columbus was an assembling point for migrants going from east Alabama
and west Georgia. Railroad tickets would be bought from local stations
to Columbus, and there the tickets or transportation for the North,
mainly to Chicago, would be secured. Americus was in many respects
similarly affected,