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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations - 8. Building Workers
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Appendix 6. Conditions of Negro Wage Earner iioi
helium South the bulk of the building work was . . .
performed by Negroes.” ^ The
South was even more rural then than now. Plantations were self-sufficient economic
entities, and the only way to get construction work done was to train a few slaves for it.
Even in the cities the white building workers suffered from competition with free
Negroes and Negro slaves who were hired out by their owners or allowed to work
independently on the condition that they give the owners part of their earnings. It goes
without saying that the white workers protested against this state of affairs, but as long
as the politically most powerful class had a considerable interest in letting Negroes have
a large share of the work, there was no way for the white worker to drive the Negro out.
A survey for 1865, made under the auspices of the federal government, indicated that
80 per cent of all skilled mechanics (including building tradesmen) in the South were
Negroes.^
The end of slavery meant the end of this protection of the Negro worker. It also
meant that plantation owners and other employers lost much of their interest in giving
training to Negroes,^’ for they were no longer assured of retaining the services of Negro
workers whom they had trained. The change, of course, was not completed in one stroke.
The Black Codes, and particularly the laws about apprenticeship, still gave employers a
vested interest in Negro labor for a long time.** This only cushioned the effects of
Emancipation. Negroes moved about as they had never done before, and the old master-
servant relationship meant much less than it had during slavery.
Already by 1890 the white workers were in the majority in the skilled building
occupations in the South.® Only one-fourth of the carpenters, for example, were Negro
at that time, and among the painters the proportion of Negroes was even lower. The
corresponding proportion for 1930 for these two groups had declined to 17 per cent.
The Negro has never had a chance to enter the ranks of the electricians, a comparatively
new occupation; by 1930, less than 2 per cent of the electricians in the South were
Negroes. Plumbing, which has been a rapidly expanding trade, has likewise given but
few opportunities to Negroes; in 1930 only 12 per cent of all plumbers in the South
were Negroes. Negroes also managed to maintain their relative position in plastering
and bricklaying jobs, at least until 193O; no less than 44 per cent of the bricklayers and
61 per cent of the plasterers in the South in 1930 were Negro. Yet if we add the
number of workers for all these six trades together, we find that the Negro’s relative
position in the South had become much worse during the period 1 91 0-1930, in that
the whites had got almost all the benefit of the big general expansion which occurred
during this period. That the Negroes received a smaller share than did whites of the
dwindling job opportunities during the ’thirties is indicated by several studies. Ana-
lyzing data from the United States Employment Service for five Southern states in
^ Ibid,y p. 285. See also Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage
Earner (1930), pp. 14-17; Spero and Harris, of, ch.y pp. 5-10; Raymond B. Pinchbeck,
The Virginia Negro Artisan and Tradesman (1926), pp. 17-54.
’’ Norgren and Associates, of, cit,y Part 3, p. 286. Norgren’s main sources are: Charles H.
Wesley, Negro Labor in the United Statesy 18$0-1^2^ (1927)* P* 142; The Freedmen*s
Record (July, 1868), pp. x 08-109; ^ind The New Era (January 13, 1870).
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