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.
THE FIELD OF ORGANIZED LABOR
In the field of organized labor, Colored Americans are also making great strides, the prejudice heretofore existing having almost disappeared. At New Orleans, Mr. T. V. O’Connor, President of the International Longshoremen’s Union, sounded the keynote when he declared, upon the admission of Colored Longshoremen to the Union: “We are going to bring about industrial equality. If Colored Americans stand ready to assist themselves, they will get the same wages and working conditions that the white man enjoys.”