Negro Migration during the War
Other social privileges as in theaters, churches and the like,
formerly allowed the negro citizens of that city, tended gradually to
be withdrawn.The negro migrants were not altogether innocent. Many of them used
their liberty in their northern home as a stumbling block. Receiving
there such high wages which they could not judiciously spend, the
unwise of their group used this unusually large income to their own
detriment and to that of the community. It was indeed difficult to
restrain a poor man who never had had a few dollars, when just arrived
from a section of the country where he had not only been poor but
restricted even in expending what income he received. Many of them
received $6, $7 and in a few cases $8 to $10 a day. They frequented
saloons and dens of vice, thereby increasing the number of police
court cases and greatly staining the record of the negroes in that
city. A number of fracases, therefore, broke out from time to time,
growing in intensity in keeping with the condition to which the
community, unaccustomed to negro neighbors, saw fit to manifest
its displeasure. This finally culminated in the recent riots in
Philadelphia in which a number of blacks and whites were killed.Feeling that they did not have the support of the officers of the law, the negroes of the city organized a Colored Protective Association and raised a fund for the prosecution of policemen and others who might aid mobs. The method of strengthening itself is to organize the churches of the city with a view to securing the cooperation of every negro there. To advance this work, a large sum has been raised. Other efforts of this sort in behalf of the negroes in Philadelphia have been made by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Armstrong Association in cooperation with the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes.

Social workers in general soon found it necessary to address themselves to the task of readjusting these migrants. The Philadelphia Academy of Medicine, composed of negro physicians, dentists and druggists, put into effect measures calculated to meet requirements for housing, sanitation, medical attention and education. Systematic medical inspections were given, and projects for the erection of houses and the adaptation of existing buildings for lodgings are under way. Eighty negro physicians of the city collected information which took the form of a weekly report of the Bureau of Health. Real estate dealers were asked to submit lists of every house immediately available for the relief of the overcrowded buildings then occupied by the negroes and to provide hundreds of new ones, cheaply but substantially constructed. Stereopticon lectures and talks were 
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