Page:The New Negro.pdf/367

 and Tuskegee and Points North! A call like this has been sounding in every important railroad center in the South since 1915, varying according to location whether in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina or Louisiana. It has been the signal for thousands of Negroes to gather their bundles, dress-suit cases and lunch boxes, and board the trains for the great industrial centers of the North—Detroit, Chicago, Akron, Pittsburgh, Newark, New York, Springfield, Cleveland and Buffalo. Some have been content to take a shorter flight and have stopped off at Birmingham, Chattanooga, Newport News and Norfolk; but all of them have been impelled by a vision, sometimes vague and dim, sometimes sharp and clear, of better wages, better living conditions and better opportunities than have been theirs on the farms and plantations of the South.

Estimates of the numbers who have joined in this migration have varied all the way from 350,000 to 1,000,000 but all have agreed that there has been a steady exodus from the country to the city, from the soil to the factory. The consequences have aroused attention both in the section from which they have come and in the section to which they have moved. The movement itself has altered conditions which they left behind and is altering the very conditions which they hoped to find. For a time the agricultural program of certain sections of the South was completely upset. In some places there was an almost complete stagnation of farming operations. Negro farm laborers left at all seasons of the year, and many a crop was left ungathered because there were no hands to take it in.

Had such a movement occurred a generation earlier the result might have been very different not alone for the Negro,