Tough sell

Printers’ Ink, July 26, 1923. Encouraged by the likes of the Chicago Defender and their own plain-as-day self-interest, Southern blacks began heading north in huge numbers in the Teens and Twenties, trading lynch law and cotton-picking debt-peonage for better paid urban industrial jobs and relative civil liberties. From the perspective of their erstwhile employers, this had to be the result of conspiratorial agitation by radicals and no-goodniks, who were messing with the minds of the impressionable colored folks. Hence the decision to fight back with this awesomely misconceived “Negroes, remember your place” propaganda campaign.