movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic
conditions; it was primarily a huddling for self-protection,--a massing
of the black population for mutual defence in order to secure the peace
and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement took
place between Emancipation and 1880, and only partially accomplished
the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the
counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of
the Black Belt.

In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult
population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the
whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the
blacks in their very numbers,--a personal freedom from arbitrary
treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite
of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and
leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes
become land-owners, and build up the black landed peasantry, which has
for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and
statesman?

To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and
know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to
unravelling the snarl of centuries,--to such men very often the whole
trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's
word, "Shiftless!" They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw
last summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of
a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a
muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in the ear. One was
driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,--a
happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility. The other was
fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticed an ear
of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it,--not they. A rod
farther on we noted another ear on the ground; and between that
creeping mule and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless?
Yes, the personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys:
they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they'll be up with the sun; they
work hard when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no
sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but