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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture - 2. In the South
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282 An American Dilemma
from the top and goes downward. It proceeds more rapidly in the newer
cities where there is less regard for tradition. In many of the older South-
ern cities there are still a considerable number of Negro carpenters, masons,
and painters, though usually not so many as earlier, at least not proportion-
ally. In other cities there are only Negro helpers. In still others Negroes
are not always allowed to be helpers. In only a few old cities on the Atlantic
Coast the observer meets an old Negro barber, catering to a passing genera-
tion of Southern gentlemen. Negro waiters are still common, but not so
common as even ten years ago. White waitresses are gradually being
substituted for them. Whites are entering into hotels even as bell boys and
elevator operators. By 1930 whites were in the majority among all workers
in hotels, restaurants, and boarding houses in the South. In railroad service
there were once a few Negro engineers, and Negroes long held a practical
monopoly as firemen. But during the last generation they have been
gradually displaced even from those “Negro jobs.” A local Negro historian,
Charles B. Rousseve, summarizes the trend thus:
In urban centers like New Orleans, the Negro, who in ante-bellum days, performed
all types of labor, skilled and unskilled, found himself gradually almost eliminated
from the various trades. In recent years, even from the meanest forms of servile
occupations he is being excluded by his fairer-skinned fellow-citizens.®
In some Southern cities whites have not disdained to take over the street
cleaning and the collecting and carting away of the garbage.
The competition from the white workers, and the gradual loss of protec-
tion from the side of the former master class, meant not only that the
Negroes’ share in the jobs became smaller in many traditional “Negro
occupations” j
but, perhaps, even more important in the long run was the
fact that Negroes, in most cases, failed to get any appreciable share in the
jobs whenever new lines of production were opened up. Negro workers,
therefore, are likely to be found in stagnating or retrogressing industries
and occupations, as the expanding ones are usually the new ones, at least
in technique. When there were technical innovations, making work less
strenuous, less dirty, and generally more attractive, this often implied a
redefinition of the occupations from “Negro jobs” to “white man’s work.”
The decline of handicrafts and the progressive mechanization of industry
generally has meant exclusion of Negroes from job opportunities. The rise
of commercial laundries, for instance, has brought about a most spectacular
decline in the number of Negro home laundresses between 1910 and 1930.
In the building trades the structure pf buildings is changing from lumber to steel.
There have been many Negro carpenters but few structural steel workers and few
chances for apprenticeship in this new field. . . . Wheelwrights and coopers are
gone, probably forever. This work is done in factories by machinery. Moreover, steel
drums, gails, sacks, and other containers have replaced the wooden barrel. Machinists
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