at more than 8,000 negroes
left Adams county during the first two years of the boll weevil
period. Census figures for 1910 show that the southwestern counties
suffered a loss of 18,000 negroes. The migration of recent years to
adjacent States has been principally to Arkansas.[72]

Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, seriously felt the migration. The
majority of the "lower middle class" of negroes, twenty-five per cent
of the business men and fully one-third of the professional men left
the city--in all between 2,000 and 5,000. Two of the largest churches
lost their pastors and about 200 of each of their memberships. Other
churches suffered a decrease of forty per cent in their communicants.
Two-thirds of the remaining families in Jackson are part families with
relatives who have recently migrated to the North.

For years the negroes of Greenville have been unsettled and
dissatisfied to the extent of leaving. Negroes came from Leland to
Greenville to start for the North. This condition has obtained there
ever since the World's Fair in Chicago, when families first learned
to go to that section whenever opportunities for establishment
were offered them. Although the negroes from Greenville are usually
prosperous, during this exodus they have mortgaged their property or
placed it in the hands of friends on leaving for the North. Statistics
indicate that in the early part of the movement at least 1,000 left
the immediate vicinity of Greenville and since that time others have
continued to go in large numbers.[73]

Greenwood, with a population evenly balanced between the white and
black, had passed through the unusual crisis of bad crops and the
invasion of the boll weevil. The migration from this point, therefore,
was at first a relief to the city rather than a loss. The negroes,
in the beginning, therefore, moved into the Delta and out to Arkansas
until the call for laborers in the North. The migration from this
point to the North reached its height in the winter and spring of 1916
and 1917. The migrants would say that they were going to Memphis, but
when you next heard from them they would be in Chicago, St. Louis or
Detroit. The police at the Illinois Central depot had been handling
men roughly. When they were rude to one, ten or twelve left. Young men
usually left on night trains. Next day their friends would say, "Ten
left last night," or, "Twelve left last night." In this manner the
stream started. Friends would not