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Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 8. Migration - 2. A Closer View
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1 86 An American Dilemma
America. Nevertheless, the idea of mass emigration to Africa or some other
place outside the United States is still not completely out of American
thinking,® although in practice it has not amounted to much so far.
Some ten thousand Negroes went to Liberia and some thousands to
Haiti before the Civil War, but after the War this emigration practically
ceased.^ Particularly after the Civil War, Negroes in small numbers
traveled back and forth between the United States and the West Indies,
but there has been little opportunity for any large-scale emigration to these
heavily populated, small islands. South America—especially Brazil, where
there is already a large proportion of Negroes—^would seem to offer many
possibilities to Negroes who wish to leave the United States. Although it
is conceivable that the closer cultural relations now opening between the
United States and South America will lead to a significant intermigration
between these two areas, few have yet taken advantage of those oppor-
tunities.
Negroes did not participate in the settlement of the West. In fact, there
are not many Negroes in the West even today. In 1940 only 2.2 per cent
of all American Negroes lived west of the Mississippi River (outside of
Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, which states may be
considered as part of the South rather than the West). Most of the Negro
migration to the West has occurred in the last decade: the Western popula-
tion of Negroes increased 21.1 per cent between 1930 and 1940. But there
was little migration when the West was a frontier, and land was cheap.
In 1890 there were only 100,986 Negroes in the West, in 1910 still only
135,872.
The reasons for this are not clear, and some historian can do a service by
investigating the problem. We know that the settlement of Negro freedmen
in the West was a frequently discu^ed possibility immediately after the
Civil War. A few movements to get away from the South developed rather
soon. By far the biggest one was to Kansas, and may have brought as many
as 40,000 Negroes to that state.® There are reasons to believe that the lack
of capital and experience on the part of Southern Negroes is only a small
part of the explanation as to why westward migration generally became
abortive. There were Negroes who had the little capital necessary to get
started on their own in the Westj others could have begun as laborers,
who were needed not only on the farms but in the huge construction work
going on. The primary explanation seems to be that in rural areas of the
West, white settlers decided that there were not to be any Negroes.^* The
same seems to have been true in most rural areas of the Northeast and in
•Sec Chapter 38, Section 12.
“This is all the more incomprehensible because Chinese were imported to do the con-
struction work in the West, and there was much g^reater piejudice against them than against
Negroes.
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