as not hitherto yielded to reason or philanthropy.
Southern men are telling their neighbors that their section must abandon
the policy of treating the Negroes as a problem and construct a program
for recognition rather than for repression. Meetings are, therefore, being
held to find out what the Negro wants and what may be done to keep them
contented. They are told that the Negro must be elevated not exploited,
that to make the South what it must needs be, the cooperation of all is
needed to train and equip the men of all races for efficiency. The aim of
all then must be to reform or get rid of the unfair proprietors who do not
give their tenants a fair division of the returns from their labor. To
this end the best whites and blacks are urged to come together to find a
working basis for a systematic effort in the interest of all.
To say that either the North or the South can easily become adjusted to
this change is entirely too sanguine. The North will have a problem. The
Negroes in the northern city will have much more to contend with than when
settled in the rural districts or small urban centers. Forced by
restrictions of real estate men into congested districts, there has
appeared the tendency toward further segregation. They are denied social
contact, are sagaciously separated from the whites in public places of
amusement and are clandestinely segregated in public schools in spite of
the law to the contrary. As a consequence the Negro migrant often finds
himself with less friends than he formerly had. The northern man who once
denounced the South on account of its maltreatment of the blacks gradually
grows silent when a Negro is brought next door. There comes with the
movement, therefore, the difficult problem of housing.
Where then must the migrants go? They are not wanted by the whites and are
treated with contempt by the native blacks of the northern cities, who
consider their brethren from the South too criminal and too vicious to be
tolerated. In the average progressive city there has heretofore been a
certain increase in the number of houses through natural growth, but owing
to the high cost of materials, high wages, increasing taxation and the
inclination to invest money in enterprises growing out of the war, fewer
houses are now being built, although Negroes are pouring into these
centers as a steady stream. The usual Negro quarters in northern centers
of this sort have been filled up and the overflow of
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