The Dawson News

DRIFTING NORTHWARD.

THAT SECTION RAPIDLY ACQUIRING AN INTEREST IN THE RACE PROBLEM.

Many Negro Men Become the Husbands of White Wives. New York's Black Population Doubled.

It is being predicted that the next census will show an exceptionally large increase in the negro population of New York. Not only have occasional visitors from the south noted a swelling of the black population in that city, but the residents are beginning to become aware of the increase, and ask themselves what will be the outcome of it, not only for incoming blacks, but for the whites who have lived there all their lives.

Mr. F. L. Batner is one New Yorker who has noted the trend of events.

"During the past eight or ten months," he told the Washington Post the other day, "I have been struck with the increasing numbers of colored people that one sees in the section above Twenty-third street. Doubtless New York is lucky in being as remote as it is from the plantations, lest great crowds of Afro-Americans might come swarming our way to their own detriment, as well as our own."

Mr. Batner, like the majority of northern men, no doubt, has the warmest sympathy for the negro, as long as he remains on the plantations of the south and is no menace to northern communities. But when he goes north in any numbers he becomes a "detriment to our interests." Be that as it may, the negro is going north, and that in such numbers that it is practically sure he will make himself felt, and that before a great while. An observant gentleman of this city who recently spent some time in New York City expressed himself as being astonished at the increase of the number of negroes to be seen in the very section referred to by Mr. Batner, and he was more than astonished to learn upon inquiry that many of the negro men were the husbands of white wives. He was told that the white women who married the black men were usually of the class that furnished the shop girls, the factory operatives and other workers, and that they married the negroes because the black men who would marry them were able to earn more money than the white men whom they might expect to marry. The negroes who marry white women are porters, janitors in large buildings, porters on palace cars, messengers in office buildings, or something of the sort, where the income is fair and the women are either immigrants or natives who have been so far removed from the black race all of their lives that they have no prejudice on account of race.

What this condition of affairs forecasts can only be conjectured. The New Yorkers will before a great while find themselves face to face with a prodigious negro problem, of which this will be one of the details.

Meantime the movement of negroes to New York is unquestionably going on in considerable volume. It is not beyond the bounds to say that the next census will find the black population of Greater New York to be twice what it was at the time of the last census, and the movement is likely to be augmented rather than diminished. To the average negro of the south heretofore New York has been as an unknown world, to be talked about and speculated upon with awe and wonder. But it is becoming more familiar now. The blacks who have gone there are writing back to their people and telling them about it, and those on the plantations are thinking more of going to see the wonderful city for themselves. Ordinarily city life is more attractive to a negro than a white man, hence, when the negro's natural fear and superstition has been reduced or removed, it is not strange that he should desire to go to New York. The time is about passed for the race question to be peculiar to the south. New York is rapidly acquiring an interest in it.—Savannah News.