THE NEGRO AT WORK
Nobody accepts church or fraternal orders as the measure of the Negro's
place in the community, for the gospel which he hears most often is the
gospel of work; and that comes less from the preacher than from the
reformer; as DuBois says: "Plain it is to us that what the world seeks
through desert and wild we have within our threshold--a stalwart laboring
force, suited to the semi-tropics." The labor system and labor ideal of
the South are very different from those of the North. First of all, there
is the old tradition of slavery times that manual toil is ignoble; that it
is menial to handle prime materials, and to buy and sell goods across the
counter. But somebody must perform hard labor if the community is to go
on; and there is an immense field for uneducated men. Besides the
so-called "public works"--that is, turpentine, sawmills, building levees
and railroads, and clearing land--there is the pulling and hauling and
loading in the ports, the rough work of oil mills and furnaces and mines,
and above all the raising of cotton, where the demand for labor is always
greater than the supply.
Some of this labor is done by white gangs, and many of the blacks are
engaged in other and higher pursuits; but the chief function of the Negro
in the South is the rough labor which in the North was once chiefly
performed by Irishmen, later by Italians, and now in many places by
Slavs. This vast industrial system is almost wholly officered by Whites,
who are the owners, employers, and managers of nearly every piece of
property in the South on which laborers are employed. They set, so far as
they can, the terms of employment; but what they get in actual work is
settled by the Negroes, notwithstanding a condition of dependence hard to
realize in the North. It is firmly fixed in the average white employer's
mind that the Negro exists in order to work for him, and that every
attempt to raise the Negro must steer clear of any suspicion that it will
lead him to abandon work for the white man. The slow drift of Negroes to
the towns and cities cannot be prevented, nor some shifting from
plantation to plantation; but the white man's ideal is that the Negro is
to stay where he is, and hundreds of thousands of them are living within
sight of the spot where they were born.
Therefore, whoever wishes to know the conditions of the typical Negro must
look for them on the plantation, where he is almost the only laborer, and
is at present prodigiously wanted. As a keen Southern observer says: "The
protection of the Negro is the scarcity of labor"; for it is literally
true that some plantations could profitably employ more than double the
hands that they can get. Nevertheless it is an axiom in the South that
"the nigger will not work." Thus General Stephen D. Lee gives currency to
the declaration that "It is a fact known to those best acquainted with the
negro race since the war, that more and more of them are becoming idle,
and are not giving us as good work as they used to do." Another authority
says: "Some few of the race are reliable--many hundreds are not. The
farmer cannot get his land turned in the winter, because ninety hundredths
of these laborers have not made up their minds as to what they want to do
in the coming year. All would go to town if fuel was not high and house
rent must be paid." An engineer in charge of large gangs in Galveston says
he never would employ Negroes if he could help it, because they cannot be
depended upon to rush work in an emergency. A planter met on a Mississippi
steamer declares that wage hands at a dollar a day would not actually put
in more than two thirds of the hours of labor; and would accomplish no
more in two weeks than a cropper working on shares would do in two days. A
Negro who employs large numbers of men says: "If a Negro can get what he
wants without working he will do it."
Another standard accusation is that the Negro will not work steadily; that
he never turns up on Monday, and will leave for frivolous reasons; that if
he has been working for five dollars a week and you raise his wages to ten
dollars he will simply work the three days necessary to earn the five
dollars, having adjusted himself to that scale. In this charge there is a
good deal of truth, but the difficulty is not confined to the African
race. Northern employers are well acquainted with the hand who never works
on Monday; and in the cotton mills of South Carolina, which are carried on
solely by white labor, it is customary to have a "Reserve of Labor" of one
fourth or one fifth in order to meet the case of the hands who wish to go
fishing, or simply are not willing to work six days a week. Probably the
remedy for the Negro is to increase his wants to the point where he cannot
satisfy them by less than a whole week's work.
As to the general accusation that the Negro will not work, many white
employers scout the suggestion. A brickmaker in St. Louis has for years
employed them and likes them better than any other kind of labor. A
Florida lumberman says: "I would not give one black man in the lumber
camps of the South for three Italians, or three of any other foreigners.
We can't get along without them, and for one, I don't want to try." And
planter after planter will tell you that, however it may be with his
neighbors, he has no trouble in keeping his people up to their work.
Another reason for skepticism is what one sees as one goes through the
country. In the first place, enormous amounts of cotton are raised where
there is nothing but negro labor. In the second place, even in winter, the
season of the year when the Negro is least busy, there are plenty of
evidences that he is at work and likely to keep at it. He may be seen at
work on his own little farm, taking care of his stock, picking his cotton,
fixing up or adding to his house, his fifteen-year-old girl plowing with
one mule. A Negro's farm is generally more slovenly than a white man's,
but the crops are raised. You see the hired hands on the great
plantations, driving four-mule teams, working in the gins, coming for
directions about breaking ground. The truth is that the Negro on the land
is doing well, far better than might be expected from people who have so
little outlook and hope of improvement, working more intelligently and
doing better than the fellahin of Egypt, the ryots of India, the native
Filipino, quite as well as the lowest end of the Mountain Whites and the
remnants of the lowland Poor Whites. It is a race-slander, refutable by
any honest investigator, that the American Negro as a race is unwilling to
work.
It is another question how far they are competent to act as foremen or
independent workers. An iron manufacturer in Alabama says he has found
that the moment Negroes are promoted to anything requiring thinking power
they fail disastrously, and ruin all the machinery put in their charge; as
miners they handle tools with skill just as long as they are furnished the
motive power, but they have little discretion or ambition. On the other
hand, the writer has seen in the Richmond Locomotive Works white men
working under negro gang bosses without friction; and in many parts of the
South the building trades are almost wholly in the hands of blacks.
Why should the belief of the African's incapacity be so widely
disseminated? First, because nineteen twentieths of the people who talk
about the lazy Negro have no personal knowledge of the field hand at work.
Their impression of the race is gained from the thriftless and irregular
Negroes in the towns and cities. If we formed our notions of Northern farm
industry from the gypsies, the dock loafers, the idle youths shooting
craps behind a board fence, we should believe a generalization that
Northern farmers are lazy. The shiftless population living on odd jobs and
the earnings of the women as domestic servants, committing petty crimes
and getting into rows with the white youths, cannot be more than one tenth
of the Negroes, and the poorest tenth at that.
Domestic service is the most exasperating point of contact between the
races. It has been reduced to a system of day labor, for not one in a
hundred of the house servants spend the night in the place where they are
employed. Great numbers of the women are the only wage earners in their
family and leave their little children at home day after day so that they
may care for the children of white families. Some mistresses scold and
fume and threaten, some have the patience of angels; in both cases the
service is irregular and wasteful. Nobody ever feels sure that a servant
will come the next morning. Most of the well-to-do families in the South
feed a second family out of the baskets taken home by the cook; and in
thousands of instances the basket goes to some member of a third family
favored by the cook. Hence the little song taken down from a Negro's lips
by a friend in Mississippi:
"I doan' has to wuk so ha'd,
'Cause I got a gal in de white folks' ya'd;
And ebry ebnin' at half past eight
I comes along to de gyarden gate;
She gibs me buttah an' sugah an' lard--
I doan' has to wuk so ha'd!"
Let one story out of a hundred illustrate this trouble. A newly married
couple, both accustomed to handsome living, set up their own establishment
in a Mississippi town, in a new house, well furnished and abounding in
heirlooms of mahogany and china; the only available candidate for waitress
is a haughty person who begins by objecting to monthly payments, and
shortly announces to her mistress: "I ain't sure I want to stay here, but
I will give you a week's trial." The patient and good-natured lady accepts
the idea of a week's experience on both sides, but before that time
expires the girl comes rushing up in a fury to announce that "I'm gwine
ter leave just now, kase you don't give yo' help 'nough to eat." It
develops that she has had exactly the same breakfast as the white family,
except that the particular kind of bacon of which she is fond has run
short. There is plenty of bacon of another brand, but that will not
satisfy her; she will not stay "where people don't get 'nough to eat." She
thereupon shakes the dust of the place off her feet and blacklists the
family in the whole place, making it almost impossible for them to find
another servant; and probably some other white mistress within a week
takes up this hungry person as being the best that she can do.
Other people have more agreeable tales of good-tempered and humorous
servants; and the negro question would be half solved if the people who
undertake domestic service and accept wages would show reasonable
interest, cleanliness, and honesty; and a million of the race might find
steady employment at good wages in the South within the next six months,
and another million in the North, if they would only do faithfully what
they are capable of doing.
There is little hope of regeneration by that means; the difficulty is that
capable Negroes do not like domestic service and seek to avoid it. The
average Southerner sighs for the good old household slaves, and harks back
to the colored mammy in the kitchen and stately butler in the drawing-room
in slavery times, as evidence that the Negroes are going backward. He
forgets that under slavery the highest honorable position open to a
colored woman was to be the owned cook in a wealthy family; that Booker T.
Washington and DuBois and Kelly Miller in those days would have been
fortunate if raised to the lofty pinnacle of the trusted butler or general
utility man on the plantation. The house servants in slavery times were
chosen for their superior appearance and intelligence, and were likely to
be mulattoes; the children and grandchildren of such people may now be
owners of plantations, professional men, professors in colleges, negro
bankers, and heads of institutions; while the domestic servant commonly
now comes from the lowest Negroes, is descended from field hands, and
chosen out of the most incompetent section of the present race. The
problem of domestic service is chiefly one of the village and the city, in
which only about a seventh of the Negroes live.
Even many Southerners have very hazy ideas about the subdivisions of
plantation laborers; and do not distinguish between the renters and
croppers, who are tenant farmers in their way, and the wage hands who are
less ambitious and not so steady. There is complaint on many plantations
that negro families do not finish their contracts, though the main outcry
is against the day laborer; yet on many of the large plantations there is
little complaint that even he does not work steadily, and little trouble
in securing from him a fair day's work.
Another disturbance of the easy generalization that the Negro will not
work is due to the variations from county to county and from place to
place. Much more depends than the outside world realizes on the capacity
of a plantation manager "to handle niggers"; and the testimony of a
perfectly straightforward planter who tells you that he knows that the
Negroes as a race run away from work because he has seen it, is no more
true of the whole people than the assurance of his near neighbor that he
knows the blacks are all industrious because they work steadily for him.
Here we come back to the essential truth that it is unsafe to generalize
about any race. There are thousands of good Negroes in the towns and
thousands of lazy rascals on the plantations; but the great weight of
testimony is that the colored man works tolerably well on the land.
Another of the statements, repeated so often that people believe them
without proof, is that the Southern Negro has lost his skilled trades. Two
Southern writers say: "Now, most of the bricklayers are white. The same
is true with respect to carpenter work. The trade of the machinist is
practically in the hands of white men." "They have been losing ground as
mechanics. Before the war, on every plantation there were first-class
carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, etc. Half the houses in Virginia
were built by Negro carpenters. Now where are they?" Nothing could better
illustrate the fact that Southerners who reprehend the interference of the
North in questions which it does not understand, are themselves myopic
guides. If the negro trades have disappeared, how does it come about that
in Montgomery, Ala., there are practically no other laborers of that type?
that the bricklayers, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, are all Negroes,
and no white boys seem to be learning those trades. The census of 1890
showed in Alabama about 13,000 colored men who had some sort of skilled
employment, many of them in trades which did not exist in slavery times,
such as iron-working, steam fitting, and service on railroads. It is true
that they are shut out of most of the callings in which there is authority
over others; there are no negro motormen or trolley conductors, no negro
engineers, though plenty of firemen; no negro conductors, though negro
brakemen are not uncommon, and in Meridian, Miss., the trains are called
in the white waiting room by a buxom negro woman.
In some Southern cities Whites, very often Northern men, have absorbed
certain trades supposed to be the peculiar province of the Negro: barber
shops with white barbers are found; the magnificent Piedmont Hotel in
Atlanta has a corps of white servants; wherever the trades unions get into
the South they are likely to work against the Negro; but in some cases he
has unions of his own; or there are joint unions of Whites and Negroes.
Considering the great opportunity for white men in callings where blacks
are not admitted it does not seem likely that they will ever be excluded
from skilled trades, though subject to more competition than in the past.
Another employment for which the African has in many ages and countries
been found suited is military service. Even in slavery times military
companies of free Negroes were not unknown, and some of them actually went
to the front for the Confederacy in the first weeks of the Civil War. Then
came the enlistment of nearly 200,000 in the blue uniform, and after the
war some thousands of men remained in negro regiments. A brief attempt to
educate colored officers in West Point and Annapolis was, for whatever
reason, not a success; and the negro troops are almost wholly under the
command of white officers. Since Reconstruction times negro militia
companies have not been encouraged, and in some states have been wholly
disbanded. The difficulty in Brownsville, Texas, in 1907, has tended to
prevent negro enlistment in the army and navy. In the Spanish War and
later in the Philippines negro regiments gave a good account of
themselves. There are a few negro policemen in the cities, but in the
South they are likely to disappear. The white man resents any assertion of
authority over him by a Negro, and in general considers him unfit to
exercise control over people of his own race.
Even in ante-bellum times there were occasional negro business and
professional men, some of whom had the confidence of their white neighbors
and made little fortunes. Since the Civil War these avenues have much
widened. The 16,000 or 17,000 ministers are still to a large degree
uneducated persons, as indeed is the case in many white churches. Negro
physicians are numerous, educated partly in Northern institutions, partly
in medical colleges of their own, partly in schools officered by white
professors, as, for instance, in Raleigh, N. C. Like the lawyers they
cannot practice without the certificate of state officers not very
friendly to them or easy to convince of their abilities; and the cream of
the practice among colored people goes to the Whites. In business, negro
merchants, manufacturers, builders, and bankers have become very numerous.
Recently a Negro Bankers' Convention was held in the South. Most of the
transactions of these men are carried on with their own people, though
they often find customers and credit with Whites. So far, there are few or
no large negro capitalists, but many promising groups of small capital
have been brought together; and at the Expositions of Charleston and
Jamestown they showed creditable exhibits of their own industries.
Two entirely new professions have opened up since the Civil War. The first
is that of journalist, and there are many negro newspapers, none of which
has any national circulation, or extended influence. The other is
teaching, which has opened up a livelihood to thousands of young men and
women. Some of the negro colleges are wholly manned by members of the
race, many of them graduates of Northern institutions, who seem to make
use of the same methods and appeal to the same aspirations as the
faculties of white colleges.
Though often accused by his white neighbor of attempts to unite in hostile
organizations, the Negroes show little disposition to rally around and
support leaders of their own race. Booker T. Washington, the man of most
influence among them, has encountered implacable opposition, and efforts
have even been made by hostile members of his own race to break up his
meetings in Boston. Inasmuch as the Negroes are excluded from politics in
the South, it is hard for any man to get that reputation for bringing
things about which is necessary in order to attract a strong following. As
DuBois points out "If such men are to be effective they must have some
power,--they must be backed by the best public opinion of these
communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as
the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to human
progress."
One of the strong influences is the conferences gathered in part at such
institutions as Hampton and Tuskegee, and Atlanta University, in part
called in other places. A considerable number of Negroes have the money
and the inclination to attend these meetings, where they learn to know
each other and to express their common wants.