Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/21

Rh worker for the interests of the colored people, is an instructor in manual training at the Wendell Phillips high school. He came from Alabama in 1917.

"I was making a social survey of the northern counties of Alabama through the financial aid of Mrs. Emmons Blaine of Chicago," he said to me. "My work was discontinued because our information collected in that territory would be useless. About one-fourth of the colored people migrated to the north.

"There were 12,000 colored people in Decatur, Ala., before the war. The migration took away 4,000, judging by a house to house canvas I made in various sections of that one city. When they took the notion they just went. You could see hundreds of houses where mattresses, beds, wash bowls and pans were thrown around the back yard after the people got throu^ picking out w'hat they wanted to take along.

"All the railroad trains from big territory farther south came on through Decatur. Some days five and six of these trains came along. The colored people in Decatur would go to the railroad station and talk with these other people about where they were going. And when the moving fever hit them there was no changing their minds.

"Take Huntsville, only a few miles from Decatur, on a branch line. There they didn't see these twelve coach trains coming through loaded with emigrants. So from Huntsville there was not much emigration.

"In many localities the educated negroes came right along with their people. I rode in September, 1917, with a minister from Monroe, La. This was his second trip. He had been to Boston and organized a church with 100 members of his Louisiana congregation. Now he was