The Changing Economic Status of the Negro

Abstract

T HE position of Negro workers in the economic history of the country has been determined largely by the special circumstances responsible for their presence here. Their labor was required, initially, as a simple multiplication of hands, for the arduous routine of developing a new country. These special circumstances demanded a fixed occupational as well as social status, which was in time profoundly disturbed by their emancipation and reestablishment as legal citizens, nominally on an equal footing with the descendants of the early settlers themselves. The question of the economic status of Negroes as an independent element of the population, thus, is of comparatively recent concern. It is doubtful, however, if this special status is more than a relationship. For, apart from the persistent influence, to the very present, of the institution of slavery, this class of labor has been a vital, even if un-selfconscious part of the history of tobacco, cotton and cane, of the agricultural and industrial life of the South; and no inconsiderable part of the whole development of the nation's resources. Its heavy shadow has been cast over the white laboring class in the South, against the foreign hordes of immigration, and against the industrial course of women workers.