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 - 14. The Negro in Business, the Professions, Public Service and Other White Collar Occupations - 2. The Negro in Business
<< 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 14. The Negro in Business , 311
outside ’the South. Since the servants of the Southern aristocracy have
usually been Negroes, well-trained Negro cooks and waiters have not been
lacking, and one would have expected that the Negro-owned restaurant
would have had a particularly good chance, once the Negro had actually
made some headway in this business.^^ There are many reports about Negro
restaurants having been popular among the white upper class in earlier
times.
But already in the 1890’s Du Bois described how the Negro caterer was
losing out.^® Part of the explanation is probably the change in the character
of the upper class restaurant business. In earlier times, the main require-
ment was good cooking and service j
the caterer may have appeared more
as a favored “collective” servant to an upper class circle than as a business-
man. But soon requirements were increased. It became necessary to invest
large capital in restaurants intended for the wealthy. Or, as Du Bois puts it:
... it is the old development from the small to the large industry, from the house-
industry to the concentrated industry, from the private dining room to the palatial
hotel. If the Negro caterers of Philadelphia had been white, some of them would
have been put in charge of a large hotel, or would have become co-partners in some
large restaurant business, for which capitalists furnished funds. ... As it was,
the change in fashion and mode of business changed the methods of the Negro
caterers, and their clientele. They began to serve the middle class instead of the rich
and exclusive, their prices had to become more reasonable, and their efforts to excel
had consequently fewer incentives. Moreover, they now came into sharp competi-
tion with a class of small white caterers, who, if they were worse cooks, were better
trained in the tricks of trade . .
Not only has the Negro caterer lost out because he has not had capital, but
also because he has often failed to modernize his business and be efficient
generally. There have been, of course, social and political pressures, as well
as economic ones, against Negro caterers. The few remaining Negro
caterers and restaurant owners serve whites mainly, and their business has
the character of a novelty rather than of a regularly accepted business.
The famous old Negro barbershops went the same way as the Negro
restaurants. Laundry work represents a somewhat similar example. There
are more Negro workers in this field than in any other occupation outside
of agriculture and domestic service. But it was the whites and the Chinese
who started the commercial laundries, which have taken hundreds of
thousands of job opportunities away from the Negro home laundresses.
There were only a few hundred. Negro owners of commercial laundries in
1930, representing about 2 per cent of the total. Not only his experience
as a worker but also his self-interest should have provided an inducement
for the Negro to go into this kind of business as an independent entre-
preneur. Yet he failed to do so.
The building trade offers another example of how the Negro has failed
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
