Negro Migration during the WarScott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
History
Negro Migration during the War
Scott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay)
African Americans; Migration, Internal -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- Economic aspects -- United States
obtaining a square deal when contending for the possessions
of life, liberty and property. They do not understand why they
are not protected from petty peace officers in search of
fees and from mobs while in the hands of officers of the law.
Finally, they do not understand why there is so little genuine
sympathy and brotherhood between them and the only people they
know--the people whose language and customs they use, under
whose laws they live, whose Bible they read, whose God they
serve. These thoughts possessed the negroes' mind when, twelve
months ago, the boll weevil and rains destroyed the crops in
the South and the European war was calling foreigners from
field and factory in the North.[30]
One should bear in mind that the two generations of negroes living in
the South are affected differently by the measures of control of the
whites, and in many cases respond differently to treatment received.
The older generation of whites and blacks avoided much friction by
a sort of mutual understanding. The children of colored and white
parents come less frequently into friendly contact and find it
difficult to live together on the terms accepted by their fathers.
Negro parents appreciate this situation but, although admitting that
they can tolerate the position to which they are assigned, they do not
welcome such an arrangement for their children. For this reason
they are not reluctant to send their sons away from home. Should
the children remain there, they live in a state of anxiety for their
safety. They would not have them grow up as they, encompassed by
restraints, and the young men themselves appear to entertain toward
the prevailing system a more aggressive hostility.
A woman of color in Greenville, Mississippi, for example, had a son
in a northern State and was afraid to invite him home to pay a visit
because, as she stated, "for him to accept the same abuses to which
we, his parents, are accustomed, would make him much less than the man
we would have him be." Another negro, a physician, the "Nestor" of
his profession, having practiced in his State over thirty-five years,
said:
Sir, I can't expect my son to accept the treatment under which
I have been brought up. My length of residence here and
the number of friends whom I know of the older and more
aristocratic type of whites will protect me but as for him,
there is no friendship. Now, as for me, there is no reason why
I should leave. I am making as much money as I could anywhere
else and all of the white people respect me. But I am just one
out of a thousand. The younger men have neither my contact nor
influence.
A lawyer of remarkable talent formerly of Mississippi, now living
with his children in Chicago, who had felt keenly this humiliation and
recognized it as one of the motives behind his change of residence,
thus stated the situation:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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