Many a case on record in the Juvenile Protective Association tells the tale of an educated young negro who failed to find employment as a stenographer, bookkeeper, or clerk. One rather pathetic story is of a boy graduated from a technical high school last spring. He was sent with other graduates of his class to a big electric company where, in the presence of all his classmates he was told that “niggers are not wanted here.” The Association has on record another instance where a graduate of a business college was refused a position under similar circumstances. This young man in response to an advertisement went to a large firm to ask for a position as clerk. “We take colored help only as laborers,” he was told by the manager of a firm supposed to be friendly to the negroes.
Business Colleges
and Industrial
Schools
Discriminate
Against the
Colored People
All the leading business colleges in Chicago, except one, frankly discriminate against negro students. The one friendly school at present among twelve hundred white students has only two colored students, but its records show as many as thirty colored students in the past. The manager, however, claims that his business has suffered in consequence of his friendliness to the negro. Even the superintendent of the Illinois Industrial School for Boys at St. Charles complains that it is not worth while to teach trades to the colored boys in his institution because it is so very difficult for a skilled colored man to secure employment.
Resulting Reaction
Against Education
This reaction against education is one of the indirect results of the difficulties which young colored people encounter in their efforts to find work. The investigators considered this difficulty one of the gravest features in the entire situation, affecting alike most disastrously all of the colored people in Chicago.
Uncongenial
Employment
Often Cause of
Criminality
From the interviews with all the boys in the jail it was clear that the lack of congenial and remunerative employment had been a determining factor in their tendency to criminality, but because the colored boys suffered under an additional handicap and because the opportunities for work are the essentials for all economic progress, the entire investigation had much to do with the basic question of employment.
Labor Unions
and the
Colored Man
The colored man believes that the Labor Unions discriminate against him, either openly or secretly; a few of the organizations have a clause in their constitutions stating that whites alone are eligible to membership, but most of them allow the colored man to pay his initiation fee and become a member; they, however, take no pains to secure him a place, and when he finds it difficult to find work because the contractor and his fellow workmen discriminate against him and only gets a job here and there, he is frequently tempted to work with “scabs,” and after several fines for this infringement of rules he drops out of the union. The investigators found that this was not the exception, but the rule. Mechanics who are members of the building trades do not complain because they have been refused membership in the unions, but because they are discriminated against when it comes to working in a building, although this discrimination is not extended to the unskilled colored man. Therefore, while many colored mechanics who come to Chicago for work return to the South where there are fewer unions and white men more willingly work with colored men, this return to the South almost never occurs among the unskilled.
An Attempt to
Compel Admission
to Labor
Unions