experience with the crops of the year 1916 on account
of the July floods.[70] By October the exodus from Dallas county had
reached such alarming proportions that farmers and business men were
devising means to stop it.

Bullock county, with a working population of 15,000 negroes, lost
about one-third and in addition about 1,500 non-workers. The reports
of churches as to the loss of membership at certain points justify
this conclusion. Hardly any of the churches escaped without a serious
loss and the percentage in most cases was from twenty-five to seventy
per cent.[71] It seemed that these intolerable conditions did not
obtain in Union Springs. According to persons living in Kingston, the
wealthiest and the most prosperous negroes of the district migrated.
In October, 1916, some of the first large groups left Mobile, Alabama,
for the Northwest. The report says: "Two trainloads of negroes
were sent over the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to work in the
railroad yards and on the tracks in the West. Thousands more are
expected to leave during the next month."

As soon as the exodus got well under way, Birmingham became one of the
chief assembling points in the South for the migrants and was one of
the chief stations on the way north. Thousands came from the flood
and boll weevil districts to Birmingham. The records of the negro
industrial insurance companies showed the effects of the migration
both from and to Birmingham. The Atlanta Mutual Insurance Company lost
500 of its members and added 2,000. Its debit for November, 1916, was
$502.25; for November, 1917, it was $740. The business of the Union
Central Relief Association was greatly affected by the migration. The
company in 1916 lost heavily. In 1917 it cleared some money.

The State of Mississippi, with a larger percentage of negroes than any
other State in the Union, naturally lost a large number of its
working population. There has been in progress for a number of years
a movement from the hill counties of the State of Mississippi to the
Delta, and from the Delta to Arkansas. The interstate migration
has resulted from the land poverty of the hill country and from
intimidation of the "poor whites" particularly in Amite, Lincoln,
Franklin and Wilkinson counties. In 1908 when the floods and boll
weevil worked such general havoc in the southwestern corner of
the State, labor agents from the Delta went down and carried away
thousands of families. It is estimated th