about to be remanded to slavery. A general convention in Nashville in May, 1879, adopted a report that set forth their grievances and encouraged migration to the North and West. Thousands now left their homes in the South, going in greatest numbers to Kansas, Missouri, and Indiana. Within about twenty months Kansas alone received thus an addition to her population of 40,000 Negroes. Difficulties of adjustment of course arose, but the whole movement was [28]sufficient to prove utterly false the contention of some that no amount of unfairness and injustice in the South would induce the Negro to move away.

[27]

[28]

As the KuKlux Klan declined, however, and the Negro, in spite of discouraging circumstances, steadily advanced in property, education, and culture, more and more the South felt the need of reënforcing its position by definite legislation. In 1890 the era of disfranchisement was formally inaugurated. In this year Mississippi so amended her constitution as to exclude from the suffrage any person who had not paid his poll-tax or who was unable to read any section of the Constitution, understand it when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation of it. Real discretion in interpretation of course lay only with the registrars, who could admit just so many persons as they deemed of good character and as understanding the duties of citizenship. South Carolina amended her constitution to similar purpose in 1895; and in 1898 Louisiana invented the so-called "grandfather clause." This excused from the operation of her disfranchising act all descendants of men who had voted before the Civil War, thus admitting to the suffrage all white men who were illiterate and without property. Other Southern [29]states in one way or another followed these three. In the final estimate of history the whole effort must appear simply as a pathetic attempt to delay the full operation of justice and the rights of man.

[29]

For the present, however, the question of the Negro's attitude toward the problem was one of surpassing moment. Suddenly, in 1895, arose a new and genuine leader, Booker T. Washington, who offered a very definite program. In a remarkable speech at the Atlanta Exposition he said to the white South: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.... Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real 

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