. LAND TENURE AND PLANTATION ORGANIZATION 45 
and Oklahoma. Abundant harvests in the western parts of these 
States draw negroes in large numbers, many of whom remain as wage 
hands the following year. Adverse crop conditions serve to depopu- 
late the section within a year or two, so far as the negro race is con- 
cerned. The same thing occurs in a measure with the whites, but to 
a lesser degree. 
For 40 years there has been a slow but constant flow of negro 
labor westward. 41 An investigation in the plantation section of 
Texas revealed that many plantation negroes came originally from 
Louisiana, and those leaving the section were reported as going west 
and north. Investigation in Louisiana failed to show any consider- 
able number of negroes coming from the west. The invasion of the 
boll weevil during the past 20 years has driven large numbers of 
laborers from certain plantation areas to public works or to other 
agricultural regions. The sugar cane and rice industries have suffered 
less from labor shortage than cotton areas, owing mainly to the effect 
of the boll weevil in the neighboring cotton districts. A discussion 
of the effect of the boll weevil on migration leads, however, to a 
consideration of a disturbance of plantation labor on a larger scale 
than has been known since the reconstruction period after the Civil 
War. 
The effects of the cotton boll weevil in Alabama and Georgia, 
coming simultaneously with high wages in the North, of which the 
laboring classes seemed suddenly to become aware, resulted in an 
exodus of common laborers by trainloads from plantation areas to 
Northern States. The number of laborers involved in this movement 
are variously estimated at from 150,000 to 350,000, some of whom 
have returned to the plantation region since the period of war pros- 
perity. The plantation States affected most by the exodus were 
Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and those affected the least 
were North Carolina and South Carolina. 42 This departure of such 
large numbers of laborers in so short a time created a general scarcity 
of labor such as the South never had known before. 
But it should be understood that a large proportion of the laborers 
leaving the South were not plantation laborers and some were not 
even farm laborers. Most of them belonged to the class of floating 
labor already described. According to information collected in 
1920-21, a very small percentage of plantation tenants were involved. 
Of 611 plantation tenants in the western cotton States in 1918 and 
1919, 132 (21 per cent) were reported as changing farms. Of the 
132 changes, 98 (74 per cent) were local and 10 (8 per cent) went to 
the North, a like number entered the Army, 3 went to other States, 
and the whereabouts of 11 were not learned. While there was a 
larger percentage of laborers of all classes leaving the more eastern 
States, it is generally believed that the proportion of tenants leaving 
for the North was relatively small. The so-called tenants leaving 
plantations were primarily those who had lost their tenant status. 
Although this condition of labor scarcity on the plantation was 
largely potential rather than actual, it had an effect on tenancy 
conditions. The tenants and croppers were not leaving the planta- 
tion areas to any alarming degree, yet they became restless and 
« Work, M. N., Negro Yearbook, 1921-22. 
42 For a more complete discussion of this subject, see Woofter, T. J., jr., Negro Migration, 1920, Columbia 
University thesis, 1921; and Negro Migration in 1916-17, Report of the U. S. Department of Labor, 1919. 
