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Chapter 8. Migration 185
the small stock of old Negro inhabitants has not been materially increased.
In the South the proportion of the Negro population that lived in cities
increased from 22.0 per cent to 37.3 per cent between 1910 and 1940.
Negroes now make up 22.3 per cent of the total urban population of the
South, while a generation ago the corresponding figure was 24.5 per cent.
The Southern rural Negro population has shrunk from 78.0 per cent of
the total number of Southern Negroes in 1910 to 62.7 per cent In 1940.
The rural Negroes are still distributed in various parts of the South in
much the same way as in 1910 and, indeed, as in i860 on the eve of the
Civil War.
In spite of the considerable mobility in the last thirty years, the great
majority of Negroes in the United States still live in the South (Figure 3).
2. A Closer View
Why has the Negro not moved around more in America? And why
have his moves—even in the last generation—^been so restricted to a few
main streams? A satisfactory answer cannot be given because of fragmen-
tary knowledge. Our attempted answer will have to be abstract, as practi-
cally all phases of the Negro problem are involved.®
After Emancipation the great masses of American Negroes were concen-
trated in the rural South, actually some four-fifths of the total Negro
population. Theoretically, there were four possible types of places where
they could move. First, they could leave the United States. Second, they
could take part in the settlement of the frontier West. Third, they could
move to the growing cities of the South or to other rural areas in the
South. Finally, they could go North. A consideration of why the Negro
did, or did not, make each of these types of movements, and of his motives
for so doing, will at least formulate sbme of the main problems involved.**
Colonization abroad had been attempted in the ante-bellum South as a
method of getting rid of the free Negroes. The back-to-Africa movement
is interesting from an ideological point of view.*-’ Its quantitative effects
upon the Negro population in America were, however, almost nothing.
Not many white people were ever deeply interested j
fewer still were
prepared to make the necessary financial sacrifices for the passage and
settlement of Negroes abroad. Most Negroes were not willing to leave
* For a more intensive treatment of several factors only hinted at in this chapter, we refer
the reader to later parts of this book, particularly Part IV on the economic status of the
Negro.
Most of the factual material for this discussion has been taken from Samuel A. Stouffer
and Lyonel C. Florant, “Negro Population and Negro Population Movements:—1860-1940,
in Relation to Social and Economic Factors,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study
(1940, levised by Lyonel Florant under title, “Negro Migration:—1860-1940” [1942]).
‘
See Chapter 38, Section 12. Also see Stouffer and Florant, of. cit.^ pp. 35-38.
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