EARNING A LIVING--MANUAL LABOR AND THE TRADES
In "The American Race Problem," one of our recent important books upon
the Negro, the author, Mr. Alfred Holt Stone of Mississippi, after a
survey of the world, declares that "to me, it seems the plainest fact
confronting the Negro is that there is but one area of any size wherein
his race may obey the command to eat its bread in the sweat of its face
side by side with the white man. That area is composed of the Southern
United States."[1]
On examination we find that only men of English and North European stock
are "white" to Mr. Stone, and that his statement is too sweeping by a
continent or two, but as applying to the United States, it will usually
meet with unqualified approval. It is generally believed that
discrimination continually retards the Negro in his search for
employment in the North, while in the South "he is given a man's chance
in the commercial world." Northern men visiting southern colored
industrial schools advise the pupils to remain where they are, and
restless spirits among the race are assured that it is better to submit
to some personal oppression than to go to a land of uncertain
employment. The past glory of the North is dwelt upon, its days of black
waiters, and barbers, and coachmen, but the present is painted in harsh
colors.
There is some truth in this comparison of economic conditions among the
Negroes in the North and in the South, but it must not be taken too
literally. Today's tendency to minimize southern and maximize northern
race difficulties, while strengthening the bonds between white
Americans, sometimes obscures the real issues regarding colored labor in
this country. We need to look carefully at conditions in numbers of
selected localities, and we can find no northern city more worthy of
our study than New York.
The New York Negro constitutes today but two per cent of the population
of Manhattan, one and eight-tenths per cent of that of Greater New York;
and, as many workers in Manhattan live in Brooklyn, the larger area is
the better one to consider. In 1900, the census volume on occupations
gives the number of males over ten years of age engaged in gainful
occupations in Greater New York at 1,102,471, and of that number 20,395
or 1.8 per cent, eighteen in every thousand, are Negroes. In Atlanta, to
take a southern commercial centre, 351 out of every thousand male
workers are Negroes. This enormous difference in the proportion of
colored workers to white must never be forgotten in considering the
labor situation North and South. We cannot expect in the North to see
the Negro monopolizing an industry which demands a larger share of
workers than he can produce, nor need we admit that he has lost an
occupation when he does not control it.
We often come upon such a statement as that of Samuel R. Scottron, a
colored business man, who, writing in 1905, said, "The Italian,
Sicilian, Greek, occupy quite every industry that was confessedly the
Negro's forty years ago. They have the bootblack stands, the news
stands, barbers' shops, waiters' situations, restaurants, janitorships,
catering business, stevedoring, steamboat work, and other situations
occupied by Negroes."[2] Did the colored men have all this forty years
ago when they were only one and a half per cent of the population? If
so, there were giants in those days, or New York was much simpler in its
habits than now. At present the control by the colored people of any
such an array of industries would be quite impossible. To take four out
of the nine occupations enumerated: the census of 1900 gives the number
of waiters at 31,211; barbers, 12,022; janitors, 6184; bootblacks, 2648;
a total of 52,065. But in 1900 there were only 20,395 Negro males
engaged in gainful occupations in New York. Without a vigorous astral
body the 20,000-odd colored men could not occupy half these jobs. If
they dominated in the field of waiters they must abandon handling the
razor, and not all the colored boys could muster 2684 strong to black
the boots of Greater New York. We must at the outset recognize that as a
labor factor the Negro in New York is insignificant.
The volume of the federal census for 1900 on occupations shows us how
the Negroes are employed in New York City. There are five occupational
divisions, and the Negroes and whites are divided among them as follows:
====================================================================
| White | Per | Negro | Per
| | cent | | cent
------------------------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------
Agricultural pursuits | 9,853 | .9 | 251 | 1.2
Professional service | 60,037 | 5.6 | 729 | 3.6
Domestic and personal service | 189,282 | 17.6 | 11,843 | 58.1
Trade and transportation | 398,997 | 37.1 | 5,798 | 28.4
Manufacturing and mechanical | | | |
pursuits | 417,634 | 38.8 | 1,774 | 8.7
------------------------------+-----------+-------+---------+-------
Total | 1,075,803 | 100.0 | 20,395 | 100.0
====================================================================
But in examining in detail the occupations under these different
headings, we get a clearer view of the place the Negro maintains as a
laborer by finding out how many workers he supplies to every thousand
workers in a given occupation. He should average eighteen if he is to
occupy the same economic status as the white man. Taking the first
(numerically) important division, Domestic and Personal Service, we get
the following table:
DOMESTIC AND PERSONAL SERVICE
Key to column headers--
A: Total number of males in each occupation.
B: Number of Negroes in occupation.
C: Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
=======================================================
| A | B | C
------------------------------+---------+--------+-----
Barbers and hairdressers | 12,022 | 215 | 18
Bootblacks | 2,648 | 51 | 20
Launderers | 6,881 | 70 | 10
Servants and waiters | 31,211 | 6,280 | 201
Stewards | 1,366 | 140 | 103
Nurses | 1,342 | 22 | 16
Boarding and lodging house | | |
keepers | 474 | 10 | 21
Hotel keepers | 3,139 | 23 | 7
Restaurant keepers | 2,869 | 116 | 40
Saloon keepers and bartenders | 17,656 | 111 | 6
Janitors and sextons | 6,184 | 800 | 129
Watchmen, firemen, policemen | 16,093 | 116 | 7
Soldiers, sailors, marines | 3,707 | 56 | 15
Laborers (including elevator | | |
tenders, laborers in coal | | |
yards, longshoremen, and | | |
stevedores) | 98,531 | 3,719 | 38
| | |
Total, including some | | |
occupations not specified | 206,215 | 11,843 | 57
=======================================================
The most important of these groups, not only in absolute numbers, but in
proportion to the whole working population, is the servants and waiters.
Two hundred out of every thousand (we must remember that the proportion
to the population would be eighteen out of every thousand) are holding
positions with which they have long been identified in America. We
cannot tell from the census how many "live out," or how many are able to
go nightly to their homes, how many have good jobs, and how many are in
second and third rate places. A study of my own of 716 colored men helps
to answer one of these questions. Out of 176 men coming under the
servants' and waiters' classification, I found 5 caterers, 24 cooks, 26
butlers, 30 general utility men, 41 hotel men, and 50 waiters. Sixty per
cent of the 176 lived in their own homes, not in their masters'. Some of
the cooks and waiters were on Pullman trains or on river boats or
steamers; only a few were in first-class positions in New York. In the
summer many of these men are likely to go to country hotels, and with
the winter, if New York offers nothing, migrate to Palm Beach or stand
on the street corner while their wives go out to wash and scrub.[3]
"An' it don't do fer me ter complain," one of them tells me, "else he
gits 'high' an' goes off fer good." Waiters in restaurants sometimes do
not make more than six dollars a week, to be supplemented by tips,
bringing the sum up to nine or ten dollars. Hall men make about the
same, but both waiters and hall men in clubs and hotels receive large
sums in tips or in Christmas money. The Pullman car waiters have small
wages but large fees.
Looking again at the census, we see that 129 out of every thousand
janitors and sextons are colored. The janitor's position varies from the
impecunious place in a tenement, where the only wage is the rent, to the
charge of a large office or apartment building. Then come the laborers,
nearly four thousand strong, with the elevator boy as a familiar figure.
Forty per cent of the 139 laborers in my own tabulation were elevator
boys, for, except in office buildings and large stores and hotels, this
occupation is given over to the Negro, who spends twelve hours a day
drowsing in a corner or standing to turn a wheel. Paul Lawrence Dunbar
wrote poetry while he ran an elevator, and ambitious if less talented
colored boys today study civil service examinations in their unoccupied
time; but the situation as a life job is not alluring. Twenty-five
dollars a month for wage, with perhaps a half this sum in tips, twelve
hours on duty, one week in the night time and the next in the day--no
wonder the personnel of this staff changes frequently in an apartment
house. A bright boy will be taken by some business man for a better job,
and a lazy one drifts away to look for an easier task, or is dismissed
by an irate janitor.
Quite another group of laborers are the longshoremen who, far from
lounging indolently in a hallway, are straining every muscle as they
heave some great crate into a ship's hold. The work of the New York
dockers has been admirably described by Mr. Ernest Poole, who says of
the thirty thousand longshoremen on the wharves of New York--Italians,
Germans, Negroes, and Swedes, "Far from being the drunkards and bums
that some people think them, they are like the men of the lumber camps
come to town--huge of limb and tough of muscle, hard-swearing,
quick-fisted, big of heart." Their tasks are heavy and irregular. When
the ship comes in, the average stretch of work for a gang is from twelve
to twenty hours, and sometimes men go to a second gang and labor
thirty-five hours without sleep. Their pay for this dangerous,
exhausting toil averages eleven dollars a week. "There are thousands of
Negroes on the docks of New York," Mr. Poole writes me, "and they must
be able to work long hours at a stretch or they would not have their
jobs." At dusk, Brooklynites see these black, huge-muscled men, many of
them West Indians, walking up the hill at Montague Street. In New York
they live among the Irish in "Hell's Kitchen" and on San Juan Hill. They
are usually steady supporters of families.
New York demands strong, unskilled laborers. To some she pays a large
wage, and Negroes have gone in numbers into the excavations under the
rivers, though a lingering death may prove the end of their two and a
half or perhaps six or seven dollar a day job. Many colored men worked
in the subway during its construction. One sees them often employed at
rock-drilling or clearing land for new buildings. About a third of the
asphalt workers, making their two dollars and a half a day, are colored.
Some educated, refined Negroes choose the laborer's work rather than
pleasanter but poorly paid occupations. A highly trained colored man, a
shipping clerk, making seven dollars a week, left his employer to take a
job of concreting in the subway at $1.80 a day. His decision was in
favor of dirty, severe labor, but a living wage.
When the next census is published, those of us who are carefully
watching the economic condition of the Negro expect to find a movement
from domestic service into the positions of laborers, including the
porters in stores, who belong in our second census division.
Kelly Miller[4] describes the massive buildings and sky-seeking
structures of our northern city, and finds no status for the Negro above
the cellar floor. One can see the colored youth gazing wistfully through
the office window at the clerk, whose business reaches across the ocean
to bewilderingly wonderful continents, knowing as he does that the
employment he may find in that office will be emptying the white man's
waste paper basket.
TRADE AND TRANSPORTATION
Key to Column Headers--
A: Total number of males in each occupation.
B: Number of Negroes in each occupation.
C: Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
=============================================================
| A | B | C
--------------------------------------+---------+------+-----
Agents--commercial travellers | 27,456 | 67 | 2
Bankers, brokers, and officials of | | |
banks and companies | 11,472 | 7 | 0
Bookkeepers--accountants | 22,613 | 33 | 1
Clerks, copyists (including shipping | | |
clerks, letter and mail carriers) | 80,564 | 423 | 5
Merchants (wholesale and retail) | 72,684 | 162 | 2
Salesmen | 45,740 | 94 | 2
Typewriters | 3,225 | 36 | 11
Boatmen and sailors | 8,188 | 145 | 18
Foremen and overseers | 3,111 | 18 | 6
Draymen, hackmen, teamsters | 51,063 | 1439 | 28
Hostlers | 5,891 | 633 | 107
Livery stable keepers | 967 | 9 | 9
Steam railway employees | 11,831 | 70 | 6
Street railway employees | 7,375 | 11 | 1
Telegraph and telephone operators | 2,430 | 6 | 2
Hucksters and peddlers | 12,635 | 69 | 5
Messengers, errand and office boys | 13,451 | 335 | 25
Porters and helpers (in stores, etc.) | 11,322 | 2143 | 188
Undertakers | 1,572 | 15 | 9
| | |
Total, including some occupations | | |
not specified | 405,675 | 5798 | 14
=============================================================
This, however, does not apply to government positions, and a large
number of the 423 colored clerks in 1900 were probably in United States
and municipal service. The latter we shall consider later as we study
the Negro and the municipality. Of the former, in 1909 there were about
176 in the New York post-offices.[5] Ambitious boys work industriously
at civil service examinations, and a British West Indian will even
become an American citizen for the chance of a congenial occupation. The
clerkship, that to a white man is only a stepping-stone, to a Negro is a
highly coveted position.
I have made two divisions of this census list; the first includes those
occupations requiring intellectual skill and carrying with them some
social position, the second, those demanding only manual work. It is in
the second that the colored man finds a place, and as a porter he
numbers 2143, and reaches almost as high a percentage as the waiter and
servant. Porters' positions are paid from five to fifteen dollars a
week, the man receiving the latter wage performing also the duties of
shipping clerk. There is some opportunity for advance, always within the
basement, and there are regular hours and a fairly steady job.
The heading of draymen, hackmen, and teamsters, with 28 colored in every
thousand, shows that the Negro has not lost his place as a driver. The
chauffeur does not appear in the census, but the Negro is steadily
increasing in numbers in this occupation, and conducts three garages of
his own.
The last census division to be considered in this chapter is that of
Manufacturing and Mechanical Pursuits.
MANUFACTURING AND MECHANICAL PURSUITS
Key to Column Headers--
A: Total number of males in each occupation.
B: Number of Negroes in each occupation.
C: Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
=============================================================
| A | B | C
--------------------------------------+---------+-------+----
Engineers, firemen (not locomotive) | 16,579 | 227 | 14
Masons (brick and stone) | 12,913 | 94 | 7
Painters, glaziers, and varnishers | 27,135 | 177 | 6
Plasterers | 4,019 | 51 | 12
Blacksmiths | 7,289 | 29 | 4
Butchers | 12,643 | 31 | 2
Carpenters and joiners | 29,904 | 94 | 3
Iron and steel workers | 10,372 | 40 | 4
Paper hangers | 962 | 18 | 19
Photographers | 1,590 | 22 | 14
Plumbers, gas and steam fitters | 16,614 | 31 | 2
Printers, lithographers, and pressmen | 21,521 | 53 | 2
Tailors | 56,094 | 69 | 1
Tobacco and cigar factory operators | 11,689 | 189 | 16
Fishermen and oystermen | 1,439 | 65 | 45
Miners and quarrymen | 326 | 21 | 64
Machinists | 17,241 | 47 | 3
| | |
Total, including some occupations | | |
not specified |419,594 | 1774 | 4
=============================================================
Bakers, boot and shoe makers, gold and silver workers, brass workers,
tin plate and tin ware makers, box makers, cabinet makers, marble and
stone cutters, book-binders, clock and watch makers, confectioners,
engravers, glass workers, hat and cap makers, and others--not more than
nineteen in any one occupation, nor a higher per cent than four in a
thousand.
When Mr. Stone wrote of the Southern States as the only place in which
the Negro could "earn his bread in the sweat of his face," side by side
with the white man, he must especially have been thinking of workers in
the skilled trades. Unskilled laborers in New York are drenched in a
common grimy fellowship. But in this last division the Negro is
conspicuous by his absence. Only four in every thousand where there
should be eighteen! In Atlanta, under this division, the race reaches
almost its due proportion, 279 in a thousand instead of 351. The largest
number in any trade in New York is 189 men among the Cuban tobacco
workers. Seventy-five per cent of all the masons in Atlanta are colored
men, while in New York the colored are less than one per cent. Looking
down the list we see that the figures are small and the percentage
insignificant. The highly skilled and best paid trades are seemingly as
far removed from the Negro as the positions of floor-walkers or cashiers
of banks.
Omitting for the present the professional class, we have reviewed the
Negro as a worker, and neither in wages nor choice of occupation has he
risen far to success. In domestic service he has gone a little down the
ladder, serving in less desirable positions than in former years. Why
has this happened? What good reasons are there for these conditions?
The first and most obvious reason is race prejudice. No display of
talent, however prodigious, will open certain occupations to the colored
race. As a salesman he could teach courteous manners to some of our
white salesmen in New York, but he is never given a chance. There are a
few Negroes, digging in the tunnels or sweeping down the subway stairs,
who are capable of filling the clerkships that are counted the
perquisites of the whites; but clerkships are only accessible as they
are associated with municipal or federal service. Of course there are
exceptions, and though they do not affect the rule, they show the
existence of a few employers who ignore the color line, and a few
Negroes of inexhaustible perseverance.
Mr. Stone argues that the Negro in the South profits by the strict
drawing of the color line, since the white man, always considered the
superior, is not lowered in the eyes of the community by working with
the black man. The Southern white may lay bricks on the same wall with
the Southern black, secure in his superior social position. But this
seems fanciful as an explanation of labor conditions. The black doctor,
for instance, in those localities where the color line is most rigid,
may not ask the white doctor to consult with him; or if he does, his
prompt removal from the community is requested. Colored postal clerks
are in disfavor in the South, though not colored postmen. North or
South, _the Negro gets an opportunity to work where he is imperatively
needed_. Constituting one-third of the working population, he can make a
place for himself in the laboring world of Atlanta as he cannot in New
York. Pick up the 20,000 New York Negroes and drop them in Liberia, and
in two or three weeks Ellis Island could empty out sufficient men to
fill their places; but remove a third of the male workers from Atlanta,
and the city for years would suffer from the calamity. If they are the
only available source of labor, colored men can work by the side of
white men; but where the white man strongly dominates the labor
situation, he tries to push his black brother into the jobs for which he
does not care to compete.
We have seen, however, that in some occupations in New York the Negroes
appear in such proportion as should be sufficient to secure them
excellent positions; the most conspicuous instance being that of the
200 colored waiters out of every thousand. Why, then, do we not see
Negroes serving in the best hotels the city affords?
It has been an ideal of American democracy, a part of its strenuous
individualism, that each member of the community should have full
liberty in the pursuit of wealth. The ambitious, capable boy who walks
bare-footed into the city, and at the end of twenty years has
outdistanced his country school-mates, becoming a multi-millionaire
while they are still farm drudges, is the example of American
opportunity. But this ability to separate one's self from the rest of
one's fellows and attain individual greatness is rarely possible to a
segregated race. In domestic service individual colored men have shown
ambition and high capability, but they have never been able to get away
from their fellows like the country boy--to leave the farm drudges and
take a place among the most proficient of their profession. They must
always work in a race group. And this Negro group is like the small
college that tries to win at football against a competitor with four
times the number of students and a better coach. The two hundred
colored waiters, competing against the eight hundred white ones, lose in
the game and are given a second place, which the best must accept with
the worst. When, then, we criticize a capable colored man for failing to
keep a superior position we must remember that he is tied to his group
and has little chance of advancement on his individual merit.
The census division of mechanical pursuits shows only a few colored men
working at trades, and the paucity of the numbers is often attributed by
the Negro to a third obstacle in the way of his progress, the
trade-union.
To the colored man who has overcome race prejudice sufficiently to be
taken into a shop with white workmen, the walking delegate who appears
and asks for his union card seems little short of diabolical; and all
the advantages that collective bargaining has secured, the higher wage
and shorter working-day, are forgotten by him. I have heard the most
distinguished of Negro educators, listening to such an incident as this,
declare that he should like to see every labor union in America
destroyed. But unionism has come to stay, and the colored man who is
asked for his card had better at once get to work and endeavor to secure
it. Many have done this already, and organized labor in New York, its
leaders tell us, receives an increasing number of colored workmen. Miss
Helen Tucker, in a careful study of Negro craftsmen in the West
Sixties,[6] found among 121 men who had worked at their trades in the
city, 32, or 26 per cent in organized labor. The majority of these had
joined in New York. Eight men, out of the 121, had applied for entrance
to unions and not been admitted. This does not seem a discouraging
number, though we do not know whether the other 81 could have been
organized or not. Many, probably, were not sufficiently competent
workmen. In 1910, according to the best information that I could secure,
there were 1358 colored men in the New York unions. Eighty of these were
in the building trades, 165 were cigar makers, 400 were teamsters, 350
asphalt workers, and 240 rock-drillers and tool sharpeners.[7]
Entrance to some of the local organizations is more easily secured than
to others, for the trade-union, while part of a federation, is
autonomous, or nearly so. In some of the highly skilled trades, to
which few colored men have the necessary ability to demand access, the
Negro is likely to be refused, while the less intelligent and well-paid
forms of labor press a union card upon him. Again, strong organizations
in the South, as the bricklayers, send men North with union membership,
who easily transfer to New York locals. Miss Tucker finds the
carpenters', masons', and plasterers' organizations easy for the Negro
to enter. There is in New York a colored local, the only colored local
in the city, among a few of the carpenters, with regular representation
in the Central Federated Union. The American Federation of Labor in 1881
declared that "the working people must unite irrespective of creed,
color, sex, nationality, or politics." This cry is for self-protection,
and where the Negroes have numbers and ability in a trade, their
organization becomes important to the white. It may be fairly said of
labor organization in New York that it finds and is at times unable to
destroy race prejudice, but that it does not create it.[8]
A fourth obstacle, and a very important one, is the lack of opportunity
for the colored boy. The only trade that he can easily learn is that of
stationary engineer, an occupation at which the Negroes do very well.
Colored boys in small numbers are attending evening trade schools, but
their chance of securing positions on graduation will be small. The
Negro youth who is not talented enough to enter a profession, and who
cannot get into the city or government service, has slight opportunity.
Nothing is so discouraging in the outlook in New York as the crowding
out of colored boys from congenial remunerative work.
The last obstacle in the way of the Negro's advancement into higher
occupations is his inefficiency. Race prejudice denies him the
opportunity to prove his ability in many occupations, and the same
spirit forces him to work in a race group; but the colored men
themselves are often unfitted for any labor other than that they
undertake.
The picture that is sometimes drawn of many thousands of highly skilled
Southern colored men forced in New York to give up their trades and to
turn to menial labor is not a correct one. Richard R. Wright, Jr., who
has made a careful study of the Negro in Philadelphia,[9] finds that
the majority of colored men who come to that city are from the class of
unskilled city laborers and country hands; the minority are the more
skilful artisans and farmers and domestic servants, with a number also
of the vagrant and criminal classes.
In New York the untrained Negroes not only form a very large class, but
coming in contact, as they do, with foreigners who for generations have
been forced to severe, unremitting toil, they suffer by comparison. The
South in the days of slavery demanded chiefly routine work in the fields
from its Negroes.[10] The work was under the direction either of the
master, the overseer, or a foreman; and there has been no general
advance in training for the colored men of the South since that time.
Contrast the intensive cultivation of Italy or Switzerland with the
farms of Georgia or Alabama, or the hotels of France with those of
Virginia, and you will see the disadvantages from which the Negro
suffers. America is young and crude, but opportunity has brought to her
great cities workmen from all over the world. In New York these men are
driven at a pace that at the outset distracts the colored man who
prefers his leisurely way. Moreover, the foreign workmen have learned
persistence; they are punctual and appear regularly each morning at
their tasks. "The Italians are better laborers than any other people we
have, are they not?" I asked a man familiar with many races and
nationalities. "No," was his answer, "they do not work better than
others, but when the whistle blows, they are always there." Mr. Stone,
whose book I have already quoted a number of times, shows the
irresponsible, fanciful wanderings of his Mississippi tenants, whom he
endeavored, unsuccessfully, to establish in a permanent tenantry. The
colored men in New York are far in advance of these farm hands, who are
described as moving about simply because they desire a change, but they
are also far from the steady, unswerving attitude of their foreign
competitors. Inadequately educated, too often they come to New York with
little equipment for tasks they must undertake successfully or
starve--unless, puerile, they live by the labor of some industrious
woman.
I have tried to depict the New York colored wage earners as they labor
in the city today. They are not a remarkable group, and were they white
men, distinguished by some mark of nationality, they would pass without
comment. But the Negro is on trial, and witnesses are continually called
to tell of his failures and successes. We have seen that both in the
attitude of the world about him, and in his own untutored self, there
are many obstacles to prevent his advance; and his natural sensitiveness
adds to these difficulties. He minds the coarse but often good-natured
joke of his fellow laborer, and he remembers with a lasting pain the
mortification of an employer's curt refusal of work. Had he the
obtuseness of some Americans he would prosper better. As we have seen,
many positions are completely closed to him, leading him to idleness and
consequent crime. Just as not every able-bodied white man, who is out of
work and impoverished, will go to the charities wood-yard and saw wood,
so not every colored man will accept the menial labor which may be the
only work open to him. Instead, he may gamble or drift into a vagabond
life. A well-known Philadelphia judge has said that "The moral and
intellectual advance of a race is governed by the degree of its
industrial freedom. When that freedom is restricted there is unbounded
tendency to drive the race discriminated against into the ranks of the
criminal." Discrimination in New York has led many Negroes into these
ranks. But as we look back at the occupations of our colored men we see
a large number who secure regular hours, and if a poor, yet a fairly
steady pay. For the mass of the Negroes coming into the city these
positions are an advance over their former work. Employment in a great
mercantile establishment, though it be in the basement, carries dignity
with it, and educating demands of punctuality, sobriety, and swiftness.
Richard R. Wright, Jr., whose right to speak with authority we have
already noted, believes that the "North has taught the Negro the value
of money; of economy; it has taught more sustained effort in work,
punctuality, and regularity." It has also, I believe, in its more
regular hours of work, aided in the upbuilding of the home.
I remember once waiting in the harbor of Genoa while our ship was
taking on a cargo. The captain walked the deck impatiently, and, as the
Italians went in leisurely fashion about their task, declared, "If I had
those men in New York I could get twice the amount of work out of them."
That is what New York does; it works men hard and fast; sometimes it
mars them; but it pays a better wage than Genoa, and there is an
excitement and dash about it that attracts laborers from all parts of
the earth. The black men come, insignificant in numbers, ready to do
their part. They work and play and marry and bring up children, and as
we watch them moving to and from their tasks the North seems to have
brought to the majority of them something of liberty and happiness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Alfred Holt Stone, "Studies in the American Race Problem," p. 164.
[2] New York _Age_, August 24, 1905.
[3] Occupations in 1907 of 716 colored men (secured from records of the
Young Men's Christian Association and personal visits) compared with
census figures of occupations in 1900.
==============================================================
| 716 Men | Census
-------------------------------------------+---------+--------
Agricultural pursuits | -- | 1.2
| |
Professional service, 27 men | 3.8 | 3.6
| |
Domestic and personal service, 363 men | 50.6 | 58.1
5 barbers, 5 caterers, 24 cooks, | |
30 general utility men, 41 hotel men, | |
76 waiters and butlers, 8 valets, | |
35 janitors and sextons, 29 longshoremen, | |
5 laborers in tunnels, 7 asphalt | |
workers, 57 elevator men, 41 laborers. | |
| |
Trade and transportation, 279 men | 39.0 | 28.4
10 chauffeurs, 35 drivers, 13 expressmen, | |
8 hostlers, 12 messengers, 14 municipal | |
employees, 127 porters in stores, | |
15 porters on trains, 24 clerks, | |
21 merchants. | |
| |
Manufacturing and mechanical | |
pursuits, 47 men | 6.6 | 8.7
+---------+-------
| 100.0 | 100.0
=============================================================
[4] Kelly Miller's "Race Adjustment," p. 129.
[5] It is difficult to get accurate figures as no official record is
kept of color.
[6] _Southern Workman_, October, 1907, to March, 1908.
[7] In 1906, and again in 1910, I secured a counting of the New York
colored men in organized labor. The lists run as follows:
1906 1910
Asphalt workers 320 350
Teamsters 300 400
Rock-drillers and tool sharpeners 250 240
Cigar makers 121 165
Bricklayers 90 21
Waiters 90 not obtainable
Carpenters 60 40
Plasterers 45 19
Double drum hoisters 30 37
Safety and portable engineers 26 35
Eccentric firemen 15 0
Letter carriers 10 30
Pressmen 10 not obtainable
Printers 6 8
Butchers 3 3
Lathers 3 7
Painters 3 not obtainable
Coopers 1 2
Sheet metal workers 1 1
Rockmen 1 not obtainable
---- ----
Total 1385 1358
The large number of bricklayers in 1906 is questioned by the man,
himself a bricklayer, who made the second counting. However, the number
greatly decreased in 1908 when the stagnation in business compelled many
men to seek work in other cities.
[8] The comment of the Negro bricklayer who secured my figures is
important. "A Negro," he says, "has to be extra fit in his trade to
retain his membership, as the eyes of all the other workers are
watching every opportunity to disqualify him, thereby compelling a
superefficiency. Yet at all times he is the last to come and the first
to go on the job, necessitating his seeking other work for a living, and
keeping up his card being but a matter of sentiment. While all the
skilled trades seem willing to accept the Negro with his travelling
card, yet there are some which utterly refuse him; for instance, the
house smiths and bridge men who will not recognize him at all. While
membership in the union is necessary to work, yet the hardest part of
the battle is to secure employment. In some instances intercession has
been made by various organizations interested in his industrial progress
for employment at the offices of various companies, and favorable
answers are given, but hostile foremen with discretionary power carry
out their instructions in such a manner as to render his employment of
such short duration that he is very little benefited. Of course, there
are some contractors who are very friendly to a few men, and whenever
any work is done by them, they are certain of employment. Unfortunately,
these are too few."
[9] R. R. Wright, Jr.'s "Migration of Negroes to the North," Annals of
the American Academy, May, 1906.
[10] See Ulrich B. Phillips' "Origin and Growth of the Southern Black
Belts," _American Historical Review_, July, 1906.