Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900-1919

6. Labor and Business

138 6. Labor and Business The composition of the Negro population of cities,especially of northern cities,is peculiar . . .in having a large proportion of wage-earners. . . .The census figures show that eighty-eight per cent of the Negro males at least ten years of age were engaged in gainful occupations, in comparison with eighty-three per cent of all males.It is among the women, however, that the greatest difference is found. . . . nearly half of the Negro women (46.30 per cent) were classified [as breadwinners]. —“The Make-Up of Negro City Groups,” Charities, 1905 The question of earning a living—how to get a job and how to hold a job—is the most serious and most difficult question confronting the Chicago Negro.He must work where he can rather than where he will. Times of industrial unrest, of which there are many in this city, have often offered to him opportunities for work which were before closed. —Richard R. Wright Jr., 1905 I want to see my people in every line of business there is. —Jesse Binga, banker, 1912 The Labor Scene The motivation behind African American migration centered on obtaining work in order to sustain individual and family needs. As Richard R. Wright Jr. summed up the situation for the acclimating black migrant Labor and Business 139 worker in the North:“His chief business in the world is to ‘keep the wolf from the door.’”African Americans embraced work aggressively in the same eager manner as native white Americans or foreign-born Chicagoans,in the process ignoring the limitations found in any occupational pursuit.As DempseyTravis remembered,“My father and his brothers were laborers,and,like many blacks, they took great pride in doing their jobs well.” Carl Sandburg’s description of Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads” proved both apt and promising to blacks.1 Indeed, Chicago represented an employment universe with ancillary avenues of work for persons with strong backs, nimble fingers, and a competitive spirit. Yet the legacy of southern slavery that first demanded total black economic subordination, and then post-emancipation wage exploitation, plagued both male and female black workers as they sought employment in the supposedly free, competitive North. Having succumbed to two centuries of forced labor without successful resistance in the form of a revolution (the likes of which white slaveholders did not really want to experience, as Haiti had under Toussaint), blacks were condemned conveniently in the national mind to be viewed as inefficient workers and consigned to labor oblivion. By the turn of the century, America accordingly was positioning its labor force into a castelike arena with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants occupying managerial and craft positions, recent European immigrants working in productive capacities, and African Americans being relegated to the domestic and service sectors. According to one historian, white America at the turn of the century, after having achieved these fixed statuses, saw blacks as “disaffected” laborers , that is, indifferent and unreliable workers.2 Part of this image of black labor was defined by labor strife and worker vulnerability. White-controlled unions in Chicago pushed to reduce competition from black workers in the labor pool through exclusion, whether because of strikebreaking or not, so they promoted exclusionary, monopolistic practices and discriminatory rules. White corporations sought the opposite, favoring a large pool of workers in order to maintain their control as well as to function as a handy lever to break white workers who challenged business domination. Another major historical factor came into play during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the widespread acceptance of Social Darwinian tenets of Nordic racial supremacy regarding employment and the provision of services left black coachmen, butlers, maids, barbers, and even bootblacks out of work.3 Black group hegemony and an acceptance of directly confronting exclusion through an attitudinal change that embraced competition with whites coincided , ironically, with Social Darwinian tenets. Its spread came via community spokesmen such as Revs. Reverdy C. Ransom and Richard R. Wright Jr. and through outside agitators such as Booker T. Washington.4 Old Settlers, 140 Labor and Business on the contrary, saw no need for a confrontational stance because they tended to romanticize the period preceding the Great Migration period. Through memories shared with university researchers, they consistently minimized the restrictive influences of the “Job Ceiling,” the racial mechanism sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace...