Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York

by Mary White Ovington

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dudley Kidd's, "Savage Childhood," a delightful book.

[2] Report of the Department of Health, City of New York, 1908, pp. 844, 849. The returns for births, the report states, are incomplete.

[3] This per cent is obtained from two sources, the births from the Department of Health report, and the deaths from the Mortality Statistics of the United States Census, 1908. "Colored" includes Chinese, a negligible quantity in the infant population.

[4] Third Annual Report of the New York Milk Committee, 1909.

[5] See G. Newman, "Infant Mortality," for a careful study of this whole subject.

[6] Census, 1900, combination of Population table and Women at Work.

[7] It is interesting to see that the married women of Fall River, where we found a very high infant death rate, show a percentage of married women at work of twenty in a hundred.

[8] My tabulations of the Negro and Tenth and Eleventh Ward Children are from the Court's unpublished records to which I was allowed access. The absence of any figures for Unlicensed Peddling in the Total indicates that in its printed reports the Court has included Unlicensed Peddling with Unclassified Misdemeanors.

[9] Mary Kingsley, "West African Studies," p. 319.

[CHAPTER IV]
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 cent	Negro	Per 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:

	Total number of males in each occupation.	Number of Negroes in each occupation.	Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
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.

	Total number of males in each occupation.	Number of Negroes in each occupation.	Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
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.

	Total number of males in each occupation.	Number of Negroes in each occupation.	Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
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.