having had many of its important industries
thereby paralyzed. Albany, a railroad center, became another
assembling point for migrants from another area. Although difficulties
would be experienced in leaving the smaller places directly for the
North, it was easy to purchase a ticket to Albany and later depart
from that town. The result was that Albany was the point of departure
for several thousand negroes, of whom a very large percentage did
not come from the towns or Dougherty county in which Albany is
situated.[64]

A negro minister, well acquainted with the situation in southwest
Georgia, was of the opinion that the greatest number had gone from
Thomas and Mitchell counties and the towns of Pelham and Thomasville.
Valdosta, with a population of about 8,000 equally divided between the
races became a clearing house for many migrants from southern Georgia.
The pastor of one of the leading churches said that he lost twenty
per cent of his members. The industrial insurance companies reported
a twenty per cent loss in membership.[65] Waycross,[66] a railroad
center in the wire grass section of the State, with a population of
7,700 whites and 6,700 negroes, suffered greatly from the migration.
Hundreds of negroes in this section were induced by the employment
bureaus and industrial companies in eastern States to abandon their
homes. From Brunswick, one of the two principal seaports in Georgia,
went 1,000 negroes, the chief occupation of whom was stevedoring.
Savannah, another important seaport on the south Atlantic coast, with
a population of about 70,000, saw the migration attain unusually large
proportions, so as to cause almost a panic and to lead to drastic
measures to check it.

The migration was from all sections of Florida. The heaviest movements
were from west Florida, from Tampa and Jacksonville. Capitola early
reported that a considerable number of negroes left that vicinity,
some going north, a few to Jacksonville and others to south Florida to
work on the truck farms and in the phosphate mines. A large number of
them migrated from Tallahassee to Connecticut to work in the tobacco
fields. Owing to the depredations of the boll weevil, many others went
north. Most of the migration in west Florida, however, was rural as
there are very few large towns in that section. Yet, although they had
no such assembling points as there were in other parts of the South,
about thirty or thirty-five per cent of the labor left.