[18]
These restrictions have made the progress of the Negroes more of a problem
in that directed toward social distinction, the Negroes have been denied
the helpful contact of the sympathetic whites. The increasing race
prejudice forces the whites to restrict their open dealing with the blacks
to matters of service and business, maintaining even then the bearing of
one in a sphere which the Negroes must not penetrate. The whites,
therefore, never seeing the blacks as they are, and the blacks never being
able to learn what the whites know, are thrown back on their own
initiative, which their life as slaves could not have permitted to
develop. It makes little difference that the Negroes have been free a few
decades. Such freedom has in some parts been tantamount to slavery, and so
far as contact with the superior class is concerned, no better than that
condition; for under the old regime certain slaves did learn much by close
association with their masters.[19]
For these reasons there has been since the exodus to the West a steady
migration of Negroes from the South to points in the North. But this
migration, mainly due to political changes, has never assumed such large
proportions as in the case of the more significant movements due to
economic causes, for, as the accompanying map shows, most Negroes are
still in the South.
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