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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter - 1. The Negro Wage Earner and the War Boom
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410 An American Dilemma
Since the war boom has brought about a tremendous scarcity of labor,
and since the available labor reserve before the boom was much greater,
in proportion, in the Negro than in the white population, one could have
expected that unemployment rates would fall more for Negro than for
white workers. That, however, has not happened. On the contrary, the
frofortion of Negroes among the unemfloyed workers was considerably
higher in the spring of ig42 than it had been two years earlier?
There are several reasons why the Negro has had much less of a chance
during this War than he had during the last War. Let us enumerate the
principal ones:^
(1) When the present war boom started, there was still widespread
unemployment. In the initial stages of war production, therefore, there
were large numbers of white workers available.®
(2) There is now in the North a much more well-organized resistance
to accepting Negroes than was the case during the First World War.
This, in part, is due to the fact that there had been much unemployment
for about ten years, making white workers more watchful against letting
jobs get away from them. Also, the Negro is no longer a new phenom-
enon in Northern industries j
Northern white workers in so far as they
are not under the effective influence of certain C.I.O. unions have had a
chance to set their minds more definitely against him. Southern-born
workers in Northern industries have helped to bring about this change in
attitude 3
the Ku Klux Klan has been active in several Northern places.
This is especially true in Detroit, which has an unusually large number
of Southern-born workers.®
(3) Since employers nowadays to a great extent have accepted trade
unions as bargaining agents, their need of the Negro as an ally in the fight
against unions is much smaller than it was formerly.
(4) The need for unskilled labor, as previously mentioned, is relatively
much smaller than it was during the First World War. This factor is
highly significant. For, although the Negro has made several noteworthy
^‘strategic gains” in skilled occupations, those gains, so far, have been
rather unimportant from a quantitative point of view. It is not certain
that he has improved, or even maintained, his relative position in the
skilled labor forced We know that the Negro has been grossly under-
represented in the vocational training program for war workers that has
been organized by the government?
It must be considered, further, that the South, as was the case during
the First World War, has received much less than a proportionate share
of the war contracts. Although the South has almost one-third of the total
population of the country, less than one-fifth of the total value of all war
supply and facility contracts and allocations assigned within the United
* Set Section % of this chapter.
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