In Atlanta, Georgia, about three-fourths of the bricklayers are Colored
Americans, but the majority of the carpenters are white. Nominally, the
rate of wages is the same for both races. One large employer held, that
Colored American’s as bricklayers had a value exceeded by no one, and
that in his own case the highest paid workmen were Colored Americans.
In Baltimore, it was found that Colored Americans occupy a very
important position in the working class element of the population. An
overwhelming majority in the building trades are Colored Americans.
In Birmingham, Alabama, there is a larger number of Colored American
workmen than in any other district in the United States. The building
and mining industries are the two in which the two races come into the
most direct competition with one another, yet in neither of these
industries does a situation exist which occasions any serious friction.
In Cleveland, Colored Americans were found in the steel and wire works,
as plasterers, hod carriers, teamsters and janitors.
In Memphis, in the transport trades and also in certain industries, such
as the making of bricks and cottonseed oil, the labor is almost entirely
Colored American. They are making their way into the skilled trades, and
in some wood working establishments both whites and blacks work side by
side at skilled occupations.
In New Orleans, the industries are of a kind which employ mainly
unskilled or semi-skilled labor, with the result that white men and
Colored Americans are found doing the same kind of work and earning the
same rate of wages.
In the Pittsburg district, more than a hundred Colored Americans are
employed in business as printers, grocers, hairdressers, keepers of
restaurants, caterers, etc. Many are employed by the municipality as
policemen, firemen, messengers, postmen, and clerks. A large number of
work people in the building and iron and steel trades are Colored
Americans, some being in highly skilled occupations.
Here is the truth from a foreign source that must be considered fair and
unprejudiced. But the home records show a more diversified distribution
maintaining a proportionate employment everywhere.
There does not appear anywhere to be a fear that the labor of Colored
Americans will crowd out the white labor, but there is a lingering
suspicion that it may do so, although practically it does not.
In consequence of this timidity, what are known as “segregation” laws
and ordinances have been passed in various places, Baltimore having made
the most extensive effort to keep the laborers of the two races apart.
In other cities, as Atlanta, Kansas City, Norfolk, Richmond, and St.
Louis, efforts were made to effect legal segregation.
The result of all these attempts to keep the Colored Americans out of
their legitimate field of competition with other Americans, failed
utterly, or caused such great financial losses to White Americans
without affecting Colored Americans in any way, or stopping their
accumulations of property, that segregation may be considered a dead
issue.
In Spokane, Washington, it has been decided judicially, that Colored
Americans can not be excluded from buying property in any particular
place in the State. The same is the judicial sentiment in New York and
elsewhere.