entucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. Firms there attempted to look
in the North that they might send for the negroes whom they had
previously employed, promising them an advance in wages.

At the same time the Illinois Central Railroad was carrying from New
Orleans and other parts of Louisiana thousands into Indiana, Illinois
and Michigan. At the Illinois Central Railroad station in that city,
the agent had been having his hands full taking names of colored
laborers wanting and waiting to go North. About the first of April,
1917, there came also the reports from New Orleans that 300 negro
laborers left there on the Southern Pacific steamer for New York, and
500 more left later on another of the same company's steamships bound
also for New York, it was said, to work for the company. Thousands
thus left for the North and West and East, the number reaching over
1,200.

It is an interesting fact that this migration from the South followed
the path marked out by the Underground Railroad of antebellum days.
Negroes from the rural districts moved first to the nearest village or
town, then to the city. On the plantations it was not regarded safe to
arrange for transportation to the North through receiving and sending
letters. On the other hand, in the towns and cities there was more
security in meeting labor agents. The result of it was that cities
like New Orleans, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Savannah and Memphis
became concentration points. From these cities migrants were rerouted
along the lines most in favor.

The principal difference between this course and the Underground
Railroad was that in the later movement the southernmost States
contributed the largest numbers. This perhaps is due in part to the
selection of Florida and Georgia by the first concerns offering the
inducement of free transportation, and at the same time it accounts
for the very general and intimate knowledge of the movement by
the people in States through which they were forced to pass. In
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for example, the first intimation of a great
movement of negroes to the North came through reports that thousands
of negroes were leaving Florida for the North. To the negroes
of Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia the North means
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England. The route is more
direct, and it is this section of the northern expanse of the United
States that gets widest advertisement through tourists, and passenge