The effect of the law in the South is to deny freedom of movement to Negroes in certain sections. He is deported if not wanted; he is restrained from leaving if wanted. He is sent to labor either on public works or for private employers to pay off fines imposed for minor offenses. Ray Stannard Baker says:

Laws in Southern States keep men from employing Negroes to go to work in other places … to a certain extent interfering with their freedom of movement…. Many other laws have been passed designed to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work. The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery is an excellent example…. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, the hiring of Negro convicts to private individuals … limit liberty…. The vagrancy laws, not unlike those of the North, and excellent in their purpose, are here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama, the Legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must prove he is not a vagrant.⁴³

FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND PRESS

Freedom of speech for the Negro has not been violated by law. That has not been necessary when violence or deportation are far more effective. Freedom of the Negro press has never raised a serious issue.

The race has not been militant nor radical enough to invite suppression. Intimidation kept them in order, too. The great increase of Negro publications in recent years and their growing vigor indicates the advances being made by Negroes toward independence of thought in their own problems. Stray cases may be noted of attacks on Negro editors.

Miss Ida B. Wells, colored editor of the “Free Speech” at Memphis, Tenn. had her paper suppressed because she so fiercely denounced the lynching of some young colored men and arraigned the authorities for failing to punish the lynchers.⁴⁴

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