Negro Migration during the War
One of the most effective agencies for dealing with the situation created by thousands of negroes migrating north was the Armstrong Association. This association gave special attention to stabilizing negro labor and to improving the housing conditions. The association brought before several corporations conditions of housing and recreation which would enable them to retain their workers. They provided a negro welfare worker for the American International Shipbuilding Company, to attend to the stabilizing of negro labor. The association is perfecting plans for better housing of negro workers and the providing of recreation centers, such as are now enjoyed in virtually every city by the white workers. The association obtained the cooperation of a number of large industrial firms and corporations in this city, to aid it in the employment of competent negro welfare workers to help adjust existing conditions, making for greater efficiency and reliability among the negro race.

The demand for labor by the many industrial plants located in New Jersey caused that State to get a very large proportion of the negro migrants and as a result to have, in acute form, the problem of housing conditions and the other problems incident to a large number of migrants being within her borders. To assist in caring for the situation a Negro Welfare League was organized with branches at various points in the State.

Writing on the situation in New Jersey, a contributor of _The Survey_, for February 17, 1917, states: The native negro residents of the city and suburban towns have been kind and generous in helping the southern stranger. They have collected money to send numbers back home, and when the bitter cold weather began they collected and distributed thousands of garments. Resident negroes have also taken hundreds of newcomers into their own homes until rooms could be found for them. But, while different churches and kind-hearted people had been most active in helping individually, there was no concerted movement to bring all these forces together until the organization of the Negro Welfare League of New Jersey. Industries of New Jersey have utterly failed to provide the housing which would enable their negro help to live decently and in enough comfort so that while growing accustomed to their unusual work, they might be stimulated to become useful and efficient. In the last two weeks, the Negro Welfare Committee, with the help of an investigation of 120 self-supporting families, all of whom were found in the worst sections of the city, showed that 166 adults--only twenty of whom are over forty years of age--and 134 children, a total of 300 souls, are all crowded into insanitary 
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