The Vanishing Negro

Over all the black, rich delta land of Mississippi, which produces 7% of the nation's cotton crop, Southern whites last week were lifting their own loads, toting their own bales. In the hills, white women and small boys sweated behind the mules down the long hot rows of cotton and corn.

For Mississippi, which still has the nation's second largest Negro population (1,074,578), was running short of Negroes.

Since 1940, when Mississippi whites outnumbered Negroes for the first time in a century, an estimated 50,000 Negroes have left the state, heading north in the hope of better pay and a better life. An additional 12,000 have gone into the armed forces. Many are in well-paid war jobs; some have quit domestic work to live on their dependency benefits. The Jackson Advocate, a Negro publication, claims that scores are moving away daily because they are "frustrated and confused" by the South's racial bigotry.

Mississippi, proud of its pleasant way of life--which has depended for more than a century on Negro labor--fretted and fumed at doing the hard work. But Mississippians continued to tack up bigger & bolder Jim Crow signs. There was no pause in the steady run of "incidents" between white civilians and Negro soldiers at the state's 36 military establishments. Politicians, bitter at the New Deal for "pampering" the colored folks, went right on orating in favor of white supremacy. The Grenada County Weekly editorialized: "The good darkies of the South should remember that, at the best, Eleanor [Roosevelt] will be boss of the U.S. a limited time, while the good white people of the South will be here forever. . . ."

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