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Footnotes 1295
® Johnson, of cit.y pp. 78-79.
® See O’Connor, of, ctt,^ pp. 156-158.
^ Actually, there have been only few examples—and those mainly during the period
1915 to 1930—^when employers have made serious attempts to make white workers
accept Negroes as fellow workers. The instances when white-dominated labor unions
have attempted to educate the employers to hire Negro workers have been even less
significant.
Chapter 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro
^
Most data on legal provisions in this section are based on Richard A. Lester,
Economics of Labor (1940). (Mimeographed; now printed.)
^ Virginius Dabney, Below the Potomac (1942), p. 1 14.
® Ibid,^ P* 87*
^ In 1930, a few years before the introduction of these minimum wage regulations,
the average hourly wage for Negro male workers in Virginia manufacturing industries
was 28 cents, as against 39 cents for white workers. The corresponding figures for Negro
and white manufacturing workers in the female group were 16 and 21 cents, respectively.
None of the specific industry groups which had more than a handful of Negro women
paid as much as 25 cents an hour to Negro females. (Department of Labor and Industry,
State of Virginia, Forty-Third Annual Reforty Calendar Year 1939, Industrial Statistics
[1941]; Thirty-fourth Annual Reforty Calendar Year 1931, Industrial Statistics,
[1932], pp. 24-26). Yet Negroes certainly had higher earnings in Virginia than in most
other Southern states. This confirms the impression that Negroes, albeit the law’s cover-
age is particularly limited as far as they are concerned, ought to be much more affected
by it than the whites.
We quoted these Virginia figures because they seem to be the only data with break-
down by race covering a whole state. (By and large, there is a greater paucity of informa-
tion by race in the Deep South than in the Upper South in official state reports on labor
conditions, public welfare and so on. Actually, the more federal or private investiga-
tions indicate the occurrence of discrimination against the Negroes, and the greater the
proportion of Negroes in the population, the more are the Negroes forgotten in official
state reports. There are exceptions to this rule, but the general trend is unmistakable.)
A complete series of such wage data, by race, would be extremely valuable for the
purpose of checking up on the enforcement of the Wages and Hours Law. Unfortunately,
the breakdown by race in the Virginia wage statistics has been discontinued during
recent years. Certain over-all wage data suggest, however, that by 1939 the total averages
for both races combined in virtually all specific industries were at least up to, or in
the neighborhood of, the 30-cent limit. This seems to be true even about certain indus-
tries where Negro women predominate and where the wage level previously had been
extremely low (such as where there prevailed an average rate of only 1 2 cents per hour
for Negro female workers in 1930).
One of these industries was peanut shelling and cleaning. Despite the substantial
increase in wages, there was no tendency to displace the Negro women in this line of
work. The candy industry, on the other hand, which started from an equally low
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