From bayou and island and Southern hamlet they have come the black masses, beckoned by that "new Statue of Liberty on the landward side of New York." What strain and stress of adjustment have they met? What have they found to do in the shifting life of the city? What handicaps reappear? What new opportunities have they won?THE glamorous city is draining the open spaces; it draws upon the human opulence of Europe; it threatens now to drain the black belt of the South. It makes no difference that New York is fast becoming unlivable, a "great shop in which people barter and sell, get rich quick and die early" there are millions of others eager to offer themselves. The dull monotony of rural life, the high wages, the gaiety, the unoppressive anonymity, the prestige of the city with its crowds and excitement set in motion years ago a trek to New York which knew no color line. How has the Negro fared in this drift to the city?
It is a strange fact that in the cities of the North, the native born Negro population, as if in biological revolt against its environment, barely perpetuates itself. For whatever reason, there is lacking that lusty vigor of increase which has nearly trebled the Negro population as a whole. Within the past sixty years the natural increase of this old Northern stock apart from migrations has been negligible. And its status has been shifting. Time was when that small cluster of descendants of the benevolent old Dutch masters and of the free Negroes moved with freedom and complacent importance about the intimate fringe of the city's active life. These Negroes were the barbers, caterers, bakers, restauranteurs, coachmen all highly elaborated personal service positions. The crafts permitted them wide freedom: they were skilled artisans. They owned businesses which were inde- pendent of Negro patronage. This group is passing, its splendor shorn. The rapid evolution of business, blind to the amenities on which they flourished, has devoured their establishments, unsupported and weak in capital resources the incoming hordes of Europeans have edged them out of their inheritance of personal service businesses, clashed with them in competition for the rough muscle jobs and driven them back into the obscurity of individual personal service.
For forty years, moreover, there have been dribbling in from the South, the West Indies and South America, small increments of population which through imperceptible gradations have changed the whole complexion and outlook of the Negro New Yorker. New blood and diverse cultures these brought and each a separate problem of assimilation. As the years passed the old migrants have "rubbed off the green," adopted the slang and sophistication of the city, mingled and married, and their children are now the native-born New Yorkers. For fifty years scattered families have been uniting in the hectic metropolis from every state in the union and every province of the West Indies. There have always been undigested colonies--the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina, the Virginia Society, the Southern Beneficial League these are survivals of self-conscious, intimate bodies. But the mass is in the melting pot of the city.
There were in New York City in 1920, by the census count, 152,467 Negroes. Of these 39,233 are reported as born in New York State, 30,436 in foreign countries, principally the West Indies, and 78,242 in other states, principally the South. Since 1920 about 50,000 more Southerners have been added to the population, bulging the narrow strip of Harlem in which it had lived and spilling over the old boundaries. There are no less than 25,000 Virginians in New York City, more than 20,000 North and South Carolinians, and 10,000 Georgians. Every Southern state has contributed its quota to a, heterogeneity which matches that of cosmopolitan New York. If the present Negro New Yorker were analyzed he would be found to be composed of one part native, one part West Indian and about three parts Southern. If the tests of the army psychologists could work with the precision and certainty with which they are accredited, the Negroes who make up the present population of New York City would be declared to represent different races, for the differences between South and North by actual measurement are greater than the differences between whites and Negroes.
The Negro by tradition, and probably by temperament, represents the exact contrast. His metier is agriculture. To this economy his mental and social habits have been adjusted. No elaborate equipment is necessary for the work of the farm. Life is organized on a simple plan looking to a minimum of wants and a rigid economy of means. The incomplex gestures of unskilled manual labor and even domestic service; the broad, dully sensitive touch of body and hands trained to groom and nurse the soil, develop distinctive physical habits and a musculature appropriate to simple processes. Add to this groundwork of occupational habits the social structure in which the Southern rural Negro is cast, his inhibitions, repressions and cultural poverty, and the present city Negro becomes more intelligible. It is a motley group which is now in the ascendancy in the city. The picturesqueness of the South, the memory of pain, the warped unsophistication, are laid upon the surface of the city in a curious pattern.
The students of human behavior who with such quick comprehension attribute the nervousness of the Jew and the growing nervous disorders of city dwellers in general to the tension of city life overlook the play of tremendous factors in the life of the Negroes who are transplanted from one culture to another.
The city Negro is only now in evolution. In the change old moorings have been abandoned, personal relations, in which "individuals are in contact at practically all points of their lives" are replaced by group relations "in which they are in contact at only one or two points of their lives." The old controls no longer operate. Whether it is apparent or not, the newcomers are forced to reorganize their lives to enter a new status and adjust to it that eager restlessness which prompted them to leave home. It is not inconceivable that the conduct of these individuals which seems so strange and at times so primitive and reckless, is the result of just this disorlerltation. And the conduct so often construed as unbearable arrogance is definitely nothing more than a com- pensa-tion for the lack of self-respect, which fate through the medium of the social system of the South has denied them. The naive reaction of a migrant, as expressed in a letter to his friend in the South, illustrates the point:
If the Negroes in Harlem show at times less courtesy toward white visitors than is required by the canons of good taste, this is bad, but understandable. It was remarked shortly after the first migration that the newcomers on boarding street cars invariably strode to the front even if there were seats in the rear. This is, perhaps, a mild example of tendencies expressed more strikingly in other directions, for with but few exceptions they are forced to sit in the rear of street cars throughout the South.Dear Partner: . . . I am all fixed now and living well. I don't have to work hard. Don't have to mister every little boy comes along. I haven't heard a white man call a colored a nagger you know how since I been here. I can ride in the street or steam car anywhere I get a seat. I don't care to mix with white what I mean I am not crazy about being with white folks but if I have to pay the same fare I have learn to want the same accommodation and if you are first in a place here shoping you don't have to wait till all the white folks get thro tradeing yet amid all this I love the good old south and am praying that God may give every well wisher a chance to be a man regardless of his color....
The dislocation shows itself in other ways. In the South one dominant agency of social control is the church. It is the center for "face-to-face" relations. The pastor is the leader. The role of the pastor and the social utility of the church are obvious in this letter sent home:
Religion affords an outlet for the emotional energies thwarted in other directions. The psychologists will find rich material for speculation on the emotional nature of some of the Negroes set into the New York pattern in this confession:Dear pastor: I find it my duty to write you my whereabouts, also family.... I shall send my church money in a few days. I am trying to influence our members here to do the same. I received notice printed in a R. R. car (Get right with God) O, I had nothing so striking as the above mottoe. Let me no how is our church I am so anxious to no. My wife always talking about her seat in the church want to no who occupying it. Yours in Christ.
In the new environment there are many and varied substitutes which answer more or less directly the myriad desires indiscriminately comprehended by the church. The complaint of the ministers that these "emancipated" souls "stray away from God" when they reach the city is perhaps warranted on the basis of the fixed status of the church in the South, but it is not an accurate interpretation of what has happened. When the old ties are broken new satisfaction' are sought. Sometimes the Young Mens' Christian Association functions. This has in some cities made rivalry between the churches and the Associations. More often the demands of the young exceed the "sterilized" amusements of Christian organizations. It is not uncommon to find groups who faithfully attend church Sunday evenings and as as faithfully seek further stimulation in a cabaret afterwards. Many have been helped to find themselves, no doubt, by having their old churches and pastors reappear in the new home and resume control. But toe' often, as with European immigrants, the family loses control over the children who become assimilated more rapidly than their parents. Tragic evidences of this appear coldly detailed in the records of delinquency.I got here in time to attend one of the greatest revivals in the history of my life over 500 people join the church. We | had a Holy Ghost shower. You know I like to have run wild.
Living in the city means more than mental adjustment. Harlem is one of the most densely peopled spots in the world. The narrow strip between 114th and 145th Streets, Fifth and Eighth Avenues, which once held 50,000 Negroes and was regarded as crowded, now pretends to accomodate nearer 150,000. Some of the consequences of this painful overcrowding are presented in other pages of this number. Not the least important is its effect on health. The physical environment of the city registered a disconcerting toll in deaths and disease until the social agencies forsook the old dogma of the racial scientists that the physical constitution of the Negro was inherently weak, and set about controlling it. Notable advances have been made, but the glamor of the city still casts grim shadows.
Similar differences between cities account for the curiously varied types of Negroes who manage to maintain themselves in New York. They defy racial classification. The Negro worker can no more become a fixed racial concept than can the white worker. Conceived in terms either of capacity or opportunity, the employment of Negroes gives rise to the most perplexing paradoxes. If it is a question of what a Negro is mentally and physically able to do, there are as many affirmations of competence as denials of it. Employers disagree. Some find Negroes equal to whites, some find them slow and stodgy; some regard them as temperamental and "snippy," some find them genial and loyal. What has not been taken into account is the difference between the Negro groups already referred to and between the stages of their orientation.
The Negro worker facing a job confronts the cankered traditions of centuries built upon racial dogma, founded upon beliefs long upset. Racial orthodoxy seems to demand that the respective status of the white and Negro races be maintained as nearly intact as the interests of industry will permit. Study the distribution of Negro workers in New York City: they are by all odds the most available class for personal service positions "blind alley" jobs which lead to nothing beyond the merit of long and faithful service. They are the porters, waiters, messengers, elevator tenders, chauffeurs and janitors. In these jobs 24,528 Negro men, by the last census count, found employment. And this number represented nearly half of all the Negro men at work in New York. The work is not difficult, the pay is fair and in lieu of anything better they drift into it. On the other hand employers know that with the normal outlets blocked for superior Negro workers, the chances favor their getting better Negro workers than white for the wages paid. None of the Horatio Alger ascensions from messenger to manager or from porter to president need be counted into the labor turnover where Negroes are concerned. Once a porter, barring the phenomenal, always a porter.
We might take another aspect of this economic picture: Negro workers, it will be found, are freely employed in certain jobs requiring strength and bodily agility, but little skill. A good example of this is long shore work. This is irregular and fitful, combining long periods of rest with sudden and sustained physical exertion. Employment of this type also leads nowhere but to worn bodies and retirement to less arduous tasks. The largest single group of Negro workers are longshoremen. There were 5,387 in 1920: 14 per cent of all the longshoremen and 9 per cent of all the Negro men at work.
Negro women are freely employed as laundresses and servants. Though they are in fierce competition with the women of other races, 24,438 or 60 per cent of all the Negro women working in New York are either laundresses or servants.
In work requiring a period of apprenticeship Negroes are rarely employed. This limits the skilled workers and the number of Negroes eligible on this basis for membership in certain trade unions. There were only 56 Negro apprentices in the 9,561 counted in the census of 1920.
In work requiring contact with the public in the capacity of salesman or representative, Negroes are infrequently employed (if they are known to be Negroes) except in Negro businesses.
In work requiring supervision over white workers they are rarely employed, though there are a few striking exceptions.
In skilled work requiring membership in unions they are employed only in small numbers, and membership is rarely encouraged unless the union is threatened. Since the apprentice-recruits for these jobs are discouraged, and the numbers sparse, the safety of the union is rarely threatened by an unorganized Negro minority. In certain responsible skilled positions, such as locomotive engineers, street car and subway motormen, Negroes are never employed.
The distinctions are irrational. A Negro worker may not be a street or subway conductor because of the possibility of public objection to contact but he may be a ticket chopper. He may not be a money changer in a subway station because honesty is required yet he may be entrusted, as a messenger, with thousands of dollars daily. He may not sell goods over a counter but he may deliver the goods after they have been sold. He may be a porter in charge of a sleeping car without a conductor, but never a conductor; he may be a policeman but not a fireman; a linotyper, but not a motion picture operator; a glass annealer, but not a glass blower; a deck hand, but not a sailor. The list could be continued indefinitely.
For those who might think, however, that this reflects the range of the Negroes' industrial capacity, it is recorded that of 321 specific occupations in New York City listed in the 1920 Census, there were one or more Negroes in 316 of them. In 175 of these occupations over 50 Negroes were employed. This wide range of employment is one of the surface indications of a deeper revolution. The sudden thinning out of recruits for the bottom places in industry following the declaration of war and the restricted immigration of South European laborers, has broken during the past ten years many of the traditions which held the Negro workers with their faces to the wall. New positions in industry have been opened up and gradually Negro men, at least, are abandoning personal service for the` greater pay of industrial work.
This can be illustrated by a few significant increases. Shortly after labor unions became active throughout the country Negro artisans threatened to disappear. In 1910 there were but 268 Negro carpenters in New York City. But in 1920 in New York the number had increased to 737. Chauffeurs who numbered 490 in 1910 were 2,195 in 1920. Ten years ago there were no known clothing workers, but now there are over 6,000. The same applies to workers in textile industries who numbered at the last count 2,685. Electricians, machinists and musicians have increased over a hundred per cent. The number of shoemakers jumped from 14 to 581, stationery firemen from 249 to 1,076, mechanics from practically none to 462 and real estate agents from 89 to 247.
One feels tempted to inquire of the "workers' friend," the unions, why those trades in which these unions are well organized have not shown equivalent increases in Negro workers. Ten years added but 18 brick masons, 81 painters, 16 plasterers and 42 plumbers.
The number of elevator tenders and teamsters decreased absolutely in the last decade. Aside from the clothing industry, the range of work remained about the same. Nearly 5,000 new women entered domestic service. The gross numbers of Negro men go into unskilled labor. There was an increase of only 57 male servants during the ten years and just 301 janitors. The solid concentration in personal service is being broken, and the workers scattered, but the skilled trades in such centers as New York still remain virtually locked to Negroes. The increases where they occur are striking, but this can be attributed to the 1ow base from which these increases must be computed.
One may look to the character of New York's industries for another peculiar handicap. While offering a diversity of employment, the city has no such basic industries as may be found, for example, in the automobile plants of Detroit, or the iron and steel works and gigantic meat slaughtering industries of Chicago. In Chicago there is diversified employment to be sure, but there is a significantly heavier concentration in the basic industries; more than that, there are gradations of work from unskilled to skilled. In certain plants skilled workers increased from 3.5 per cent of the Negro working population in 1910 to 13.5 per cent in 1920 in Chicago. In the slaughtering houses there are actually more semi-skilled Negro workers than laborers. The number of iron molders increased from 31 in 1910 to 520 in 1920 and this latter number represents lo per cent of all the iron molders.
In the working age groups of New York there are more women than men. For every hundred Negro men there are llo N.egro women. This is abnormal and would be a distinct anomaly in an industrial center. The surplus women are doubtless the residue from the general wash and ebb of migrants who found a demand for their services. The city actually attracts more women than men. But surplus women bring on other problems, as the social agencies will testify. "Where women preponderate in large numbers there is a proportionate increase in immorality because women are cheap.". . . The situation does not permit normal relations. What is most likely to happen, and does happen, is that women soon find it an added personal attraction to contribute to the support of a man. Demoralization may follow this and does. Moreover, the proportion of Negro women at work in Manhattan (60.6) is twice that of any corresponding group, and one of the highest proportions registered anywhere.
The nature of the work of at least 40 per cent of the men suggests a relationship, even if indirectly, with the tensely active night life by which Harlem is known. The dull, unarduous routine of a porter's job or that of an elevator tender, does not provide enough stimulation to consume the normal supply of nervous energy. It is unthinkable that the restlessness which drove these migrants to New York from dull small towns would allow them to be content with the same dullness in the new environment, when so rich a supply of garish excitements is available.
Entering gradually an era of industrial contact and competition with white workers of greater experience and numerical superiority, antagonisms loom up. Emotions have a wav of reenforing themselves. The fierce economic fears of men in competition can supplement or be supplemented hy the sentiments engendered by racial difference. Beneath the disastrous East St. Louis conflict was a boiling anger toward Southern Negroes coming in to "take white men's jobs." The antagonisms hetireen the Negroes and the Irish in New York, which even now survive, were first provoked sixty years ago when these workers met and clashed over jobs. The hostile spirit was dominant in the draft riots of New York during the Civil War and flared again in the shameful battle of "San Juan Hill" in the Columbus Hill District. These outbreaks were distinctly more economic than racial.
Herein lies one of the points of highest tension in race relations. Negro workers potentially menace organized labor and the leaders of the movement recognize this. But racial sentiments are not easily destroyed by abstract principles. The white workers have not, except in few instances, conquered the antagonisms founded on race to the extent of accepting the rights of Negro workers to privileges which they enjoy. While denying them admission to their crafts they grow furious over their dangerous borin~s from the outside. "The Negroes are scabs!" "They hold down the living standards of wurkers by cutting under!" "Negroes are professional strike breakers!" These sentiments are a good nucleus for elaboration into the most furious fears and hatreds.
It is believed variously that Negro workers are as a matter of policy opposed to unions or as a matter of ignorance hlcapable of appreciating them. From some unions they are definitely barred; some insist on separate Negro locals; some limit them to qualified membership; some accept them freely with white workers. The situation of the Negroes, on the surface, is to say the least compromising. Their shorter industrial experience and almost complete isolation from the educative influence of organized trade unions contribute to some of the inertia encountered in organizing them. Their traditional positions have been those of personal loyalty, and this has aided the habit of individual bargaining for jobs in industry. They have been, as was pointed out, under the comprehensive leadership of the church in practically all aspects of their lives including their labor. No effective new leadership has developed to supplant this old fealty. The attitude of white workers has sternly opposed the use of Negroes as apprentices through fear of subsequent competition in the skilled trades. This has limited the number of skilled Negroes trained on the job. But despite this denial, Negroes have gained skill.
Tlle disposition violently to protest the employment of Negroes in certain lines because they are not members of the union and the equally violent protest against the admiss.on of Negroes to the unions, created in the Negroes, desperate for work, an attitude of indifference to abstract pleas. In 1910 they were used to break the teamsters' strike and six years later they were organized. In 1919 they were used in a strike of the building trades. Strained feelings resulted, but they were finally included in the unions of this trade. During the outlaw strike of the railway and steamship clerks, freight handlers, expressmen and station employee, they were used to replace the striking whites and were given preference over the men whose places they had taken. During the shopmen's strike they were promoted into new positions and thus made themselves eligible for skilled jobs as machinists. In fact, their most definite gains have been at the hands of employers I and over the tactics of labor union exclusionists.
Where the crafts are freely open to them they have joined with the general movement of the workers. Of the 5,386 Negro longshoremen, about 5,000 are organized. Of the 735 Negro carpenters, 400 are members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Of the 2,275 semi-skilled clothing workers practically all are members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The musicians are 50 per cent organized. The difl¨culty is that the great preponderance of Negro jobs is in lines which are not orgamzed. I`he porters, laundresses (outside of laundries) and servants have no organization. The Negroes listed as painters are not in the painters' union, many of them being merely whitewashers. The tailors are in large part cleaners and pressers. The waiters, elevator tenders (except females) are poorly organized.
The end of the Negro's troubles, however, does not come with organization. There is still the question of employers, for it is a certain fact that preference is frequently given wllite workers vvhen they can be secured, if high wages are to be paid. A vicious circle indeed! The editors of The Messenger have suggested a United Negro Trades Union built on the plan of the United Hebrew Trades and the Italian Chamber of Lahor. The unions are lethargic; the Negroes skeptical, untrained and individualistic. Meanwhile they drift, a disordered mass, self-conscious, but with their aims unrationalized into the face of new problems.
The workers of the South and the West Indies who have come to this city with vagrant desires and impulses, their endowments of skill and strength, their repressions and the telltale marks of backward cultures, with all the human wastes of the process, have directed shafts of their native energy into the city's life and growth. They are becoming a part of it. The restive spirit which brought them to the city has been neither all absorbed nor wasted. Over two-thirds of all the businesses operated by Negroes in New York are conducted by migrant Negroes. They are in the schools they are the radicals and this is hopeful. The city Negro an unpredictable mixture of all possible temperaments is yet in evolution.
But a common purpose is integrating these energies and once leashed to a purposeful objective, it is not improbable that in industry and in the life of the city the black workers will compensate in utility and progressiveness for what they lack in numbers and traditions.