iting of labor to be sent outside the boundaries
of these respective cities and States.[86] In some instances also
Negro assistants of railroad labor agents were maltreated, arrested,
and heavily fined.[87] For example, at Thomasville, Georgia, a Negro
and a white man were arrested on the charge of being labor agents.[88]
In another case, at Sumter, South Carolina, a popular Negro minister
who was found at the railroad station bidding farewell to some of his
parishioners, who were leaving for the North, was arrested as a labor
agent.[89]

Besides these tirades against the labor agents, drastic methods were
adopted to prevent the Negroes from going North. These were resorted
to mainly by the police and were so executed as to discourage movement
from the South. In some cities police officers visited railroad
stations, rounded up Negroes by hundreds, and took them to prison on
the flimsiest sort of accusations. On the days following such arrests,
however, all the Negroes who had been thus imprisoned were
released.[90] An example of this is the occurrence at Savannah,
Georgia, where on one occasion the police arrested and jailed every
Negro who happened to be in the station regardless of where he might
have been going. Sometimes, as was done once at Albany, Georgia, they
destroyed the tickets of migrants who were waiting to board trains for
the North.[91] At Greenville, Mississippi, it was the custom to stop
trains, drag Negroes therefrom, and prevent others from boarding them.
Strangers were subjected to search in order to secure evidence which
might prove them to be labor agents.[92] The ticket agent at
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, until restrained by the general
superintendent, attempted to interfere with the movement by refusing
to sell tickets to Negroes desiring to leave for the North.[93] Also,
the Mayor of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, tried to check the
movement by requesting the President of the Illinois Central Railroad
to use his influence to stop this road from carrying Negroes to the
North. To this request the President replied that, while he was
opposed to the Negro migration, his road, as a common carrier, could
not either refuse to sell tickets to the Negroes or fail to provide
them the necessary means of transportation.[94] Moreover, many Negroes
who were not migrants were subjected on every hand to arbitrary
arrests on mere petty charges in order to intimidate and terrorize
them.

These repressive m