The Black Worker in Industry, Agriculture, Domestic and Personal Service

Abstract

The position of the Negro in industrial pursuits today is conditioned by a basic conflict between black and white labor which had its inception in their competing positions as slave and free laborer. This basic conflict was intensified after emancipation when the Negro lost his protected status and entered into direct competition with white labor as a part of the free labor population. Racial antipathies, which had become ingrained in the two groups during slavery, were reflected in their inability to recognize any common basis of collective action or similarity of interest. Thus, the hope of general betterment of the Negro's position in industrial occupations through collective action with the dominant working group implies the elimination or certainly minimizing of the ancient conflict between the two groups. At the close of the Civil War, an overwhelming majority of some 4,000,000 ex-slaves remained in Southern agriculture. A few, however, were able to gain entrance to industrial occupations and to the handicraft trades in which they excelled. The Negro skilled craftsmen who outnumbered the whites, at this time, 5 to 11 in the South, were thus forced into a position as a labor reserve from which they entered into direct competition with the white craftsmen. The paucity of Negro labor in Southern factories following the Civil War was a reflection of the dearth of industrial development in a predominantly agricultural region. The majority of those who became attached to the existing industries found employment in "the flour mills and tobacco factories of Virginia and North Carolina and in the phosphate industry of South Carolina"2 as unskilled laborers. Others were employed in substantial numbers as longshoremen and as common laborers in the construction gangs of the railroads. During the 80's and 90's the Negro became a factor in a number of developing Southern industries but made few inroads in the North. The rapid increase in industrial activity had begun to break the grip in which cotton had long held the South and was affording new jobs for unskilled Negro labor in coal mines, steel mills, cotton seed oil and fertilizer plants. One in-