Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 8. Migration - 2. A Closer View
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter 8. Migration 189
2. Those Southern districts which tended to have relatively few Negroes
in i860 also had relatively few in 1930.®
3. In 1930, as in i860, the regions of dense Negro population were
concentrated in the crescent, sometimes narrow, sometimes broad,
between the Potomac and Texas and between the mountains and the
sea (see Figure 2). This old pJantation belt is %lack” today, as it was
at the time of Emancipation, although the proportion of Negroes in
the population has declined. The two great mountain regions—^the
Appalachians and the Ozarks—^were still almost entirely devoid of
Negroes, and areas in the Border states outside the mountains tended
to show decreases rather than increases in the percentage Negro.
Not only did the Negro not share in the expanding opportunities in the
South, but also the areas in which the Negroes lived declined from an
economic standpoint. Most important was the deterioration of cotton pro-
duction in the Black Belt of the Southeast. In the states east of Mississippi,
Negro-operated farms produced 643,000 fewer bales of cotton in 1929
than in 1909, while white-operated farms increased production by 90,000
bales.®
Thus we have seen that the Negro did not share much in the growth
of the West and of the South. For a long while—until the World War,
in fact—it did not seem that he would share in the even greater growth
of the North. During and immediately after the First World War came
the Great Migration, and ever since then Negroes have not stopped coming
to the urban North.^® Negroes probably came in greater relative numbers
than the Southern whites who had more opportunities within the old South
and in the new South of Texas and Oklahoma, but they did not come as
rapidly after 1915 as did the white immigrants from Europe before the
First World War. By 1940 there were 2,439,201 Negroes living in the
North, east of the Mississippi River, or 19.0 per cent of the total Negro
population in the country and 3.9 per cent of the total Northern population.
Population distribution within the South was, of course, somewhat affected
by the northward migration after 1914. Many Negroes went North from
the Border states, and their number was not quite replenished by Negroes
coming from farther South. Those portions of Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia which lie east of the mountains lost Negro population most heavily,
but have made it up—except for the Piedmont area—by natural increase.^^
The inadequate explanation that we gave in discussing lack of migration
to the West is all we have to account for the extreme concentration in a
few Northern cities. There is enough industrial activity, and there could
be opportunity for anonymity, as well as a low level of race prejudice, in
many of the smaller cities of the North to permit a significant immigration
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
