men
lynched by hundreds in the face of a sneering world. They saw a people
with heads bloody, but unbowed, working faithfully at wages fifty per
cent. lower than the wages of the nation and under conditions which
shame civilization, saving homes, training children, hoping against
hope. They saw the greatest industrial miracle of modern days,--slaves
transforming themselves to freemen and climbing out of perdition by
their own efforts, despite the most contemptible opposition God ever
saw,--they saw all this and what they saw the distraught employers of
America saw, too.

The North called to the South. A scream of rage went up from the cotton
monopolists and industrial barons of the new South. Who was this who
dared to "interfere" with their labor? Who sought to own their black
slaves but they? Who honored and loved "niggers" as they did?

They mobilized all the machinery of modern oppression: taxes, city
ordinances, licenses, state laws, municipal regulations, wholesale
police arrests and, of course, the peculiarly Southern method of the mob
and the lyncher. They appealed frantically to the United States
Government; they groveled on their knees and shed wild tears at the
"suffering" of their poor, misguided black friends, and yet, despite
this, the Northern employers simply had to offer two and three dollars a
day and from one-quarter to one-half a million dark workers arose and
poured themselves into the North. They went to the mines of West
Virginia, because war needs coal; they went to the industries of New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, because war needs ships and iron; they went to
the automobiles of Detroit and the load-carrying of Chicago; and they
went to East St. Louis.

Now there came fear in the hearts of the Unwise Men. It was not that
their wages were lowered,--they went even higher. They received, not
simply, a living wage, but a wage that paid for some of the decencies,
and, in East St. Louis, many of the indecencies of life. What they
feared was not deprivation of the things they were used to and the
shadow of poverty, but rather the definite death of their rising dreams.
But if fear was new-born in the hearts of the Unwise Men, the black man
was born in a house of fear; to him poverty of the ugliest and straitest
type was father, mother, and blood-brother. He was slipping stealthily
northward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and the
shadow of death.

Here, then, in the wide valley wh