This committee has experienced difficulty not so much in finding openings for Negroes, as in getting reliable Negroes to fill them. Boys and girls, though educated in the public schools, come out without knowing how to do anything that will earn them a living. Although the advantages of Cooper Institute and other industrial training schools are open to Negroes, they have been little used, either from lack of knowledge of the opportunity, or because the Negroes preferred the regular literary courses of the schools. So many unskilled and untrained Negroes, both old and young, have discouraged many employers from trying any sort of Negro help. I shall not forget the significant remark of a white employer I met in Indianapolis: a broad-gauge man, known for his philanthropies.
“I’ve tried Negro help over and over again, hoping to help out the condition of Negro idleness we have here. I have had two or three good Negro workers, but so many of them have been wholly undisciplined, irresponsible, and sometimes actually dishonest, that I’ve given up trying. When I hear that an applicant is coloured, I don’t employ him.”
Upon this very point Professor Bulkley said to me:
“The great need of the young coloured people is practical training in industry. A Negro boy can’t expect to get hold in a trade unless he has had training.”
R. R. Wright, Jr., who has made a study of conditions in Philadelphia, says:
“It is in the skilled trades that the Negroes are at the greatest disadvantage. Negroes have been largely shut out of mechanical trades partly because of indifference and occasional active hostility of labour unions, partly because it has been difficult to overcome the traditional notion that a ‘Negro’s place’ is in domestic service, but chiefly because there have been practically no opportunities for Negroes to learn trades. Those Negroes who know skilled trades and follow them are principally men from the South, who learned their trades there. The poorest of them fall into domestic service; the best have found places at their trades. For the Negro boy who is born in this city it is difficult to acquire a trade, and here, I say, the system has been weakest.”
With the idea of giving more practical training School No. 80 in New York, of which Professor Bulkley is principal, is now opened in the evenings for industrial instruction. Last year 1,300 coloured people, young and old, were registered. In short, there is a recognition in the North as in the South of the need of training the Negro to work. And not only the Negro, but the white boy and girl as well—as Germany and other European countries have learned.
The Road from Slavery to Freedom
At Indianapolis I found an organisation of Negro women, called the Woman’s Improvement Club. The president, Mrs. Lillian T. Fox, told me what the club was doing to solve the problem of the coloured girl and boy who could not get work. She found that, after all, white prejudice was not so much a bugaboo as she had imagined. The newspapers gave publicity to the work; the Commercial Club, the foremost business men’s organisation of the city, offered to lend its assistance; several white employers agreed to try coloured help, and one, the Van Camp Packing Company, one of the great concerns of its kind in the country, even fitted up a new plant to be operated wholly by coloured people. Last fall, after the season’s work was over, one of the officers of the company told me that the Negro plant had been a great success, that the girls had done their work faithfully and with great intelligence.
Just recently a meeting of coloured carpenters was held in New York to organise for self-help, and they found that, by bringing pressure to bear, the Brotherhood of Carpenters was perfectly willing to accept them as members of the union, on exactly the same basis as any other carpenters.