It has sometimes been said that these people are not reliable as
workers, that they are migratory, that they fail to appear on Monday
mornings, etc., and hence that it is hardly advisable to give them a
chance in American industry on a large scale. Hear the testimony of
Homer L. Ferguson, described as "the most human shipbuilder in
America--and one of the ablest," fully half of whose 7,800 men and
boys in his great Newport News shipyard are Negroes. Mr. Ferguson was
born in North Carolina and he was talking to a Northern reporter:
"Don't you dare come down from the North to this yard and tell us that
the black man in the South is an industrial failure--you who only use
him as an elevator boy or a parlor-car porter or a chauffeur and
refuse to give him an equal industrial opportunity with white labor.
How long would one of our expert machinists last at Taunton or at
Paterson or at Schenectady? What opportunity would the unions give
him? Can one of our good riveters go north and join the union? He can
not. And otherwise he can not drive a single rivet."
What would the unions do in fact? What have they done already? We
learn from the very valuable study by Mr. Abraham Epstein, "The Negro
Migrant in Pittsburgh," in the publications of the School of Economics
of the University of Pittsburgh, that an official of a union which has
a membership of nearly five thousand, said that it had about five
colored members. An official of an even more powerful union was
"greatly astonished when he learned that there are white people who
take an interest in the Negro question. He absolutely refused to give
any information and did not think it worth while to answer such
questions, although he admitted that his union had no colored people
and would never accept them." To be thoroughly concrete, however, let
us consider the Negro plasterers of Pittsburgh. On January 1, 1917,
about thirty of these men, discriminated against by the local white
union, wrote to the national organization in Middletown, Ohio, asking
formally to have a local body of their own. Headquarters sent back
reply to the effect that a charter could not be given without the
consent of the older organization. Then followed a meeting in which
the Negro secretary was given five minutes before the white local at
its regular meeting. Nothing resulted. Under such circumstances is it
any wonder that Negroes adopt a canny attitude when labor unions are
concerned? More than this, can not organized labor itself realize the
dangers for all in this hostile attitude toward the black race?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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