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

9. Employment and Political Contention

257 9. Employment and Political Contention In the South you had to work whether you wanted to or not unless you were very sick. White people did not have to work there as they do here. They made the Negro do the work. —Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago The Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective unit of politic power, good or bad, in America. —Carl Sandburg, 1919 It is imperative that we have in every city, county, state, and national legislative body a man from among us, a watch-dog so to speak, of our interests. Bitter experience has taught us that even though we have had good white friends at court, blood is thicker than water. —Chicago Defender, 1916 The Economic Fabric: The Rise of an Industrial Proletariat During these labor-starved war days, migrants journeyed to Chicago to work, and work they did. The impact of their arrival was felt immediately in the city’s vaunted meatpacking plants: “From 1917 to 1921, Negro workmen found their status enhanced because . . . they were the men [and women] without whom the packers could not continue production. . . . Nor could organized labor afford to ignore them longer.”1 These blacks, women as well as men, entered the stockyards as a result of “the war [that] stimulated the demand of goods, and therefore labor, and at the same time, decreased the available labor supply.”2 258 Employment and Political Contention After generations of inadequate compensation for work accompanied by persistent rural debt as a seeming disincentive, African Americans who migrated into a labor-scarce environment experienced an immediate improvement in wage earning and an elevated status within the national workforce. No longer agricultural workers growing an unprofitable and redundant staple in cotton, African Americans by the hundreds upon thousands came north and joined blacks already in residence, transforming into an integral part of the city’s industrial proletariat. According to historian William M. Tuttle Jr., “The proportion of workers among blacks was much higher than that among whites. For example, whereas 10.5 per cent of all Chicago’s males and 11.1 per cent of all its females were between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, 13.7 per cent of the black males and 15.0 per cent of the black females were between these ages.”3 Labor researcher Alma Herbst uncovered a pattern by the meatpackers of utilizing the services of successive waves of different nationalities and races to meet the immediate labor needs of the slaughtering and packinghouses at any given period. Now African Americans en masse followed the Slavic groups whom Upton Sinclair wrote of in The Jungle in 1906. African Americans assumed the underdog role that southern and central Europeans had taken when they succeeded the Germans and the Irish in the packinghouses.4 Charles S. Johnson observed that labor opportunities extended beyond one industry into the entirety of Chicago’s diversified economy. This proved a financial blessing to the black worker. Within the basic industries of “iron and steel works and gigantic meat slaughtering industries,” new doors of employment opened for the first time. Added to this was a diversified workforce hierarchy in these basic or heavy industries, where “in certain plants skilled workers increased from 3.5 percent of the Negro working population in 1910 to 13.5 per cent in 1920.” To these laborers’ benefit, within the hierarchical structure of work in the plants, skilled workers earned higher wages and counted even a few African Americans within their ranks. Semiskilled workers occupied the next rung with a small number of African Americans found among their ranks. Yet “in the slaughtering houses there [were] actually more semi-skilled workers than [unskilled] laborers.”5 Unskilled workers represented 80 percent of the laboring force in areas that required no special skills. A bright spot appeared in the theoretical possibility of worker control over this work space. According to Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, the shop floor, where the slaughter and processing of animals took place, proved to be a pivotal locus of work production. In terms of control, it was one ripe for the taking by ambitious, organized workers, because whatever transpired on the shop floor dictated the rate of progress in producing a final product for market.6 Employment and Political Contention 259 African American laborers found work in the stockyards in massive numbers at the...