Mexico, and Cuba, as they have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our feet. Concerning the Vagrant Negro Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes—idle while every industry and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour. And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many idle or partly idle Negroes—even after the riot,[Pg 57] which served, I understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men) drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these saloons—conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city authorities—pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women? After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in January, 1908, all the saloons were closed. [Pg 57] Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply—the Negro. Now Negroes, though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has, relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and bankers—always draining away the best and most industrious men of the race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the unskilled Irishman and German in the North—upward through the door of education—but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers coming in to take their places. What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they had. Negro
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