M—— L——, forty-two years old, came to Chicago from Tennessee in 1894. He said: "I tried every job under the sun since I came. My first job was porter in the Palmer House; made good tips here but not very much salary. Changed to bellboy; was finally made head bellboy; stayed there four years; boss made me mad and I quit. Along about this time I met my wife. I wanted to make her think I was a regular man, so got a job as a laborer in a foundry. Since then I've gone from one foundry to the other. Work got so hard I quit one time; went on the road; stayed there for about four years, then went back to the foundry work; worked for Illinois Malleable for three years first time; had trouble with straw boss; he fired me; went to McCormick's but they didn't pay so well, so I got back on my old job. Yes, unions are the best thing in the world for a working man. If I'd been in a union my boss couldn't have fired me that time. I wish it was so you could join a union regardless of your color. We need protection on our jobs as well as the white man. I guess though that time is coming. I don't know much about the workings of a union, but I do know it's a protection to the man who belongs."
F—— D——, twenty-eight years old, does not belong to a union because there are no unions in the car shops where he works. He says unions are the best things in the world if the right kind of people are at the head, and if all the fellows will join, but when half of them won't join, unionism won't do because it just means loss of your job.
R—— R——, thirty-four years old, has been working in Chicago three months at his regular trade as a stove joiner. He learned to join stoves at a mill in Helena. He has never had a chance to join a union, but all the white men in the mill at Helena belonged, and they fared lots better than the Negro men. He wants to join one here the very first chance he gets. He is a skilled laborer, knows he can put out as much work as any man doing his line of work, feels he should be paid as much as anyone else, and knows the only way this can happen to him is to get in a union where he has some protection and backers. There is a union where he is, but he hasn't been asked to join it yet. He says he has found out that the colored man, if he wants the same thing as a white man gets, has to get in things with them.
Mrs. N—— M—— found work as a maid in a Chicago hospital after she was deserted by her husband. She wants to save money enough to run her while she takes "nurse training." She did not know anything about unions until she went to the hospital. The nurses there had a union, and she saw just how much they can mean to people. "They usually make the employers do the right thing by the people; unless the nurses asked too much they got what they wanted." That was what made her decide she wanted to be a nurse; she saw how square they were with each other, and how the union made them pull together regardless of whether or not they liked each other. That is what she liked about the unions: "They make you treat the other fellow right regardless how you feel toward him."
Nellie W——, age thirty, doing clerical work in a large mail-order establishment, said that "unions don't mean anything to colored people. The only reason they let them in when they do is so they can't become strike breakers." She didn't know how her husband felt about unions, as they had never talked about the matter, but she knew that she wouldn't join one.
O—— L——, thirty-eight years old, had migrated from Georgia in the summer of 1917. To him unions are "the best thing that ever came the colored man's way. Out here [in a box factory] it doesn't make quite so much difference whether I'm in one or not, but if I ever go back to my trade as plasterer, that's the first thing I intend to try and do. You get protection, you get more money, and then too the white man gets a chance to see that you are not all for yourself, for when you are in a union you work for everybody's good."
H—— has been a head waiter in a hotel. He believes the big reason why Negroes are not strongly enthusiastic for unions is because they feel they will not get square treatment. This he based upon continual references to the 1903 waiters' strike.
The attitude of indifference or suspicion so frequently encountered among Negro workers outside of the unions is attributed by white and Negro labor leaders and union men to the following reasons: (a) traditional treatment of Negroes by white men; (b) influence of racial leaders who oppose unionism; and (c) influence of employers' propaganda against unionism.
The traditional treatment of Negroes in the South, increasingly reflected in the North, has made the Negro suspicious of the white man's sincerity. Negroes, therefore, naturally feel that they will not get a "square deal" in white unions. In support of this attitude the waiters' strike of 1903 is still cited as an instance of "double-crossing" by white unions.
This strike was so often referred to by Negroes as a justification for their attitude toward labor-union policies that it seemed worth while to attempt to learn the facts, even though seventeen years had elapsed since the strike occurred.