sary its migration to other parts.

This sounds singular in this land of the free and it is singular, for of
no other class of American labor could it be said that its right to
migrate from one state to another is actually obstructed by law and would
be resisted by force. It is singular but it is nevertheless true. If a
thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand agricultural laborers in
the West were to make up their minds to move to the cotton belt of the
South, they would be free to do so, regardless of the injury which Western
farmers might suffer in consequence of their migration. But if one hundred
thousand, or ten thousand, or even one thousand Negro cotton pickers
desired to quit picking cotton and to seek their fortune in other states,
does anyone imagine that they would be allowed to depart in peace, that
they would not find rather by violent experience that they are not at
liberty to make the change? The South does not regard the Negro laborer
then as undesirable but quite the contrary--only it wants to retain
possession of it on its own terms, not on those advantageous to that
labor.

As an American citizen then the Negro has a paper right to move freely
from one place to another, but in the South were he to attempt to realize
on this right he would in all probability find himself realizing on a
totally different proposition--maybe the chain gang at the hands of a
prejudiced court on some trumped up charge of an employer, or death at the
hands of a mob. This sounds amazing and it is amazing because it fits the
Negro's case so exactly, because it is an accurate description of his
condition as an agricultural laborer in many of the Southern states.

On every hand over against his paper rights as a citizen, the Negro faces
facts which make his citizenship seem like a snare and a delusion. Let us
suppose that a member of the American Negro Academy wishes with wife or
daughter to visit Florida for his health. He cannot make the journey there
like a white man, whether citizen or foreigner, or like any other
traveller to that section whatever his race since he be not a Negro. And
it makes no difference how refined or educated or wealthy or infirm or
aged a colored passenger may be, whether man, woman or child, he
encounters the same unjust and unequal treatment at the hands of the
railroads. What though he has paid for himself and wife or daughter the
same fare which passengers of the favored class pay, he fi