Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture - 3. A Closer View
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture 287
whites are usually organized in the same locals even in the South, and race
relations in these unions are often comparatively amicable. Nevertheless,
there has been a decline in the proportion of Negro workers in Southern
states. But Negroes are probably still in the majority in the Upper and
Lower South. Taking the building industry in the entire country as a whole,
there was a decrease even in the absolute number of Negro workers between
1910 and 1930, in spite of the fact that the total man-power remained
unchanged, and although the migration of Negroes to the North broadened
the market for their services.®
Comparing 1910 and 1930, one finds that, except for a temporary boom
during the First World War, the expansion had ceased in some of the most
significant “Negro job” industries, such as saw and planing mills, turpen-
tine farms and maintenance-of-way work on railroads. This was one of the
main reasons why the general expansion in job opportunities for Southern
Negroes was less pronounced during this period than during the previous
two decades. In the railroad services the number of Negro engineers, which
had never been large, was reduced to virtually nothing. There was, as we
mentioned, a decline also in the number of Negro firemen and brakemen.
The railroad brotherhoods, most of which exclude Negroes more con-
sistently than almost any other American trade union, eventually became
sufficiently powerful to keep the Negroes out of any job which was—or
which, through technical development, became—attractive enough to be
desirable to the white man.
Again Negroes failed to get into most of the new and expanding
industries in the South. Only one per cent of the workers employed at
Southern oil and gas wells in 1930 were Negroes. Only as wood cutters
and in certain other laboring capacities did Negroes get into the paper and
pulp industry. Gas and electric companies have never used Negroes to any
appreciable degree. Negroes do not operate streetcars and buses. Tele-
graph and telephone companies exclude them almost altogether. Furniture
factories depend in the main on white labor. The vast expansion in whole-
sale and retail trade, banking, insurance, and brokerage benefited the
Negroes only in so far as they could be used as delivery men, porters,
janitors, charwomen and so on. The policy of excluding them from
production jobs in the textile factories continued.
There were not many lines of work in which Negroes made any appreci-
able gains during this period. Coal mines and steel mills continued to expand
in the South, and the Negroes had employment gains from their expan-
sion. The same was true of longshore work where Negroes traditionally
had such a dominant position in the South that the trade unions never could
exclude them to any significant degree, even though there was some local
discrimination. Fertilizer factories, which constitute one of the most typical
“Negro job” industries, showed a particularly rapid expansion between
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
