Leave a Summer Land Behind

This chapter examines the exodus of southern Negroes into Indiana and other states in the North. The Democrats charged that the Negroes' mass migration from the South was engineered by the Republicans in order to gain political control, and by the railroads in search of passenger business. Several prominent Negroes throughout the nation seriously and collectively considered the migration and its effects. While the Southern press and public officials professed to see in the exodus a temporary and not extremely significant phenomenon, planters and civic leaders held a convention of both white and Negro citizens which met in Vicksburg, Mississippi, May 6, 1879, to discuss means of regulating the migration. This chapter considers the dramatic increase in the Negro population of Illinois in the decade 1860–1970 and concludes with a discussion of the rioting and lynching sparked by the accusation of Mrs. Mabel Hallam, a white woman of Springfield, that she was raped by a Negro, George Richardson.