“Well, they’re treated more like men up here in the North,” he said, “that’s the secret of it. There’s prejudice here, too, but the colour line isn’t drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all gets back to a question of manhood.”
In the North prejudice is more purely economic than it is in the South—an incident of industrial competition.
In the South the Negro still has the field of manual labour largely to himself, he is unsharpened by competition; but when he reaches the Northern city, he not only finds the work different and more highly organised and specialised, but he finds that he must meet the fierce competition of half a dozen eager, struggling, ambitious groups of foreigners, who are willing and able to work long hours at low pay in order to get a foothold. He has to meet often for the first time the Italian, the Russian Jew, the Slav, to say nothing of the white American labourer. He finds the pace set by competitive industry immensely harder than in most parts of the South. No life in the world, perhaps, requires as much in brain and muscle of all classes of men as that of the vast Northern cities in the United States. I have talked with many coloured workmen and I am convinced that not a few of them fail, not because of their colour, nor because they are lazy (Negroes in the North are of the most part hard workers—they must be, else they starve or freeze), but for simple lack of speed and skill; they haven’t learned to keep the pace set by the white man.
A contractor in New York who employs large numbers of men, said to me:
“It isn’t colour so much as plain efficiency. I haven’t any sentiment in the matter at all. It’s business. As a general rule the ordinary coloured man can’t do as much work nor do it as well as the ordinary white man. The result, is, I don’t take coloured men when I can get white men. Yet I have several coloured men who have been with me for years, and I wouldn’t part with them for any white man I know. In the same way I would rather employ Italians than Russian Jews: they’re stronger workers.”
Not unnaturally the Negro charges these competitive difficulties which he has to meet in the North (as he has been accustomed to do in the South) to the white man; he calls it colour prejudice, when as a matter of fact, it is often only the cold businesslike requirement of an industrial life which demands tremendous efficiency, which in many lines of activity has little more feeling than a machine, that is willing to use Italians, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Negroes, or Hindus, or any other people on the face of the earth. On the other hand, no doubt exists that many labour unions, especially in the skilled trades, are hostile to Negroes, even though they may have no rules against their admission. I heard the experiences of an expert Negro locomotive engineer named Burns who had a run out of Indianapolis to the South. Though he was much in favour with the company, and indeed with many trainmen who knew him personally, the general feeling was so strong that by soaping the tracks, injuring his engine, and in other ways making his work difficult and dangerous, he was finally forced to abandon his run. If there were space I could give many accounts of strikes against the employment of Negroes. The feeling among union labour men has undoubtedly been growing more intense in the last few years owing to the common use of Negroes as strike breakers. With a few thousand Negroes the employers broke the great stockyards strike in Chicago in 1904, and the teamsters’ strike in the following year. Colour prejudice is used like any other weapon for strengthening the monopoly of the labour union. I know several unions which are practically monopolistic corporations into which any outsider, white, yellow, or black, penetrates with the greatest difficulty. Such closely organised unions keep the Negroes out in the South exactly as they do in the North. A Negro tile-setter, steam-fitter or plumber can no more get into a union in Atlanta than in New York. Of course these unions, like any other closely organised group of men, employ every weapon to further their cause. They use prejudice as a competitive fighting weapon, they seize upon the colour of the Negro, or the pig-tail and curious habits of the Chinaman, or the low-living standard of the Hindu, to fight competition and protect them in their labour monopoly.
WARD IN A NEGRO HOSPITAL AT PHILADELPHIA
STUDIO OF A NEGRO SCULPTRESS