The Negro Comes of Age in Industry
by ROBERT C. WEAVER
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34 DEAD; OVER 500 INJURED IN BLOODY DETROIT RACE RIOT
MOB SLAYS 2, WRECKS BUSINESS SECTION IN NEGRO AREA OF BEAUMONT
TWO FORT BLISS SOLDIERS SLAIN AS FAKE RIOT RUMORS CAUSE OUTBREAK
MILLION MAN-HOURS LOST IN DETROIT RIOTING
THESE headlines startled the nation. They announced violent eruptions in areas of racial tension. In each instance the outbreak followed a familiar pattern of dissemination of false rumors, the occurrence of a provocative incident, and the development of mob psychology and hysteria. Beneath these outward manifestations there are fundamental social and economic maladjustments breeding race hatred. They have existed for generations.
Although the recent wave of interracial violence was unmistakably foretold by a series of smaller conflicts, an attempt has been made to ignore or to minimize the dangers of the situation. Specific outbreaks have been interpreted as isolated “incidents,” and peculiar local irritants have been presented as the occasion for them.
Racial conflict has been brewing for the past three years. Huge concentrations of white and colored troops in areas contiguous to small urban and semirural communities have taxed existing housing, transportation, and recreational facilities. Traditional attitudes and methods of local law enforcement have often increased or incited racial discord. In centers of industrial activity, there have been and continue to be — especially for Negroes — inadequate housing, woefully deficient recreational facilities, and overcrowded transportation lines.
These community defects, under the strain of wartime living, result in short tempers and fights. Local police, on many occasions, have been most inept in handling potentially explosive situations involving Negroes, and the press has often stressed inflammatory material. But more important than any of these has been the reaction of the community to the changes in the economic status of the Negro which were inevitable at the outbreak of the war — changes which are becoming imperative as we face a Serious shortage of manpower.
During the First World War, Negroes were introduced as unskilled workers in many new industries and areas. Problems of housing, transportation, and recreation arose. Racial tensions grew and ultimately found expression in post-war riots essentially similar to those of 1943. Now areas of Negro employment are again expanding. The black worker is entering new industries and, more important, he is going into new and higher types of occupations. He is being introduced in many places as a semiskilled and skilled production worker. Not only has economic necessity required this development, but the Negro himself has constantly pressed for wider job opportunities. These trends and the opposition to them are underlying factors in the current racial tension which faces America.
The arbitrary assumption that Axis agents manufactured the recent riots may appear to relieve the nation of a grave responsibility, but actually it is only a convenient avoidance of the facts. The fundamental cause of these conflicts has not been “ zoot suits,” the acts of hoodlums of any race, the migration of prejudiced Southern whites, or the rise of native racialists. Although each of these elements played an important part, the primary cause of the outbreaks was the existence of long-neglected issues in interracial relations.
We face the rise of racial disturbances because we have not taken preventive measures to avoid them. An immediate program for relieving the tension would begin by ameliorating situations which cause the Negro to be acutely resentful of a position outside the main stream of American life. It would establish fair employment practices offering the Negro a chance to participate freely and fully in the war production program; it would permit him to serve in the armed forces on the same terms as white citizens; it would make him feel that he is an important part of the nation and that his contribution is wanted and appreciated by his fellow citizens.
Simultaneously steps should be taken to interpret the cost of racial tension and conflict to the nation, to direct management and labor in methods for successfully introducing new sources of labor, to secure the effective coöperation of national, state, and local officials in carrying out programs for dealing with the basic causes of race conflict, and to direct community pressures upon those who encourage race prejudice and bigotry.
These steps will be effective as emergency wartime measures, but they are only temporary palliatives. A long-run national program for combating racialism in the United States must dig down to the basic causes. One of the most important of these is economic. It stems from the fear of job insecurity and competition. The black worker has become a symbol of a potential threat to the white worker, and the Negro’s occupational advancement is consciously or unconsciously feared.
This fear has been bred in the economic realities of America. Its origins lie in the unfavorable position of the “poor white” in the slave era and under the intense competition for employment in the South during Reconstruction. The repeated introduction of the Negro as a strikebreaker, particularly in the industrial North and West, was instrumental in spreading the fear geographically and infecting organized labor with its germ. It has grown out of the American worker’s experience with an economy which has seldom had enough jobs to absorb the labor supply. In such an economy, its development was an inevitable consequence of a caste system which perpetuated the concept of white men’s jobs and black men’s jobs; while, at the same time, it was used to secure the support of the white worker for such a system.
Resistance to advances in the economic and occupational status of the Negro persists even in periods of full employment, such as the present, because better jobs for him represent a direct challenge to the accepted color caste system. To some the changes represent a loss of Negro servants and laborers; by others they are interpreted as a threat to the white man’s job in the post-war economy. Also, in recent months, the higher earnings of the Negro have made him an effective competitor for limited available supplies of housing, transportation, food, clothing, and other goods and services.
At the same time, the entrance of the Negro into new spheres of activity has brought the “race problem” into the experience of hundreds of thousands of Americans who never before had any real contact with it. These citizens are poorly prepared to meet the situation. Most of them accept the popular misconceptions about race; many of them have been conditioned to look for undesirable racial characteristics; almost all of them have been disturbed about, the so-called militancy of the Negro, who has often been described as their potential economic competitor.
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THIS summer more than a million Negroes were in war plants. The vast majority entered war work during the latter half of 1942 and the first quarter of 1943. Unemployment among Negroes has reached a new low, and occupational progress has been steady. Signs are already in the air that the black worker may emerge from this war with significant footholds in semi-skilled production jobs. The tradition of white men’s jobs and black men’s jobs is being challenged and actually broken down in a score of tight labor markets outside the South. In the South itself there are unmistakable evidences of economic advances among Negroes, and this fact has been dramatically and unpalatably brought to the attention of the white community by the scarcity of Negro domestics.
Although unemployment among Negroes has been materially reduced, there is far from effective utilization of this source of labor. Fortune s survey ol five thousand leading business executives in February of this year revealed that fewer than 30 per cent of them employed as much as 10 per cent Negro labor, and over a third did not believe that Negroes could be effectively used in their plants.
Colored workers in war industries are still, for the most part, employed below their maximum or potential skills. Few of them participate in in-plant training and upgrading programs. They are poorly represented in industries where most of the jobs require semi-skilled and skilled production workers. Their female labor reserves remain essentially untapped by war industries, and the bulk of Negro workers are still in non-essential employment. Many are concentrated in areas of labor surpluses and are not being trained or recruited for essential war work.
The job ahead is primarily one of effective utilization of labor. It involves securing acceptance of Negro women in industrial employment, transferring Negro men and women from non-essential to war production, moving Negroes from areas of labor surpluses to tight labor markets, and facilitating vastly wider participation of Negroes in in-plant training and upgrading programs. There has been progress in Negro employment, but it has been uneven and spotty. The continuation of this progress, necessary to the war effort, involves a definite break with the situation at the beginning of the war. It will occasion changes which have been interpreted in the past as economic threats to the white worker and inconveniences to the normal economy. The Negro in the United States has developed more rapidly than his opportunities for participation in American life. Although he has been and is conditioned through exposure to education and propaganda to seek the goals of Americans, he is denied these goals and accused of being impatient and unduly militant when he exerts pressures to achieve them. As a matter of fact, in demanding fully recognized citizenship, the Negro is being a typical American, seeking accepted American objectives in characteristic American ways. He is demanding for American citizens more of those freedoms which the nation is dedicated to secure for peoples all over the world.
Many sincere and well-meaning people counsel retreat from the current trend toward new and better jobs for Negroes. Such employment, they say, inevitably results in conflict; therefore the Negro should not press for industrial diversification and occupational advancement but accept more employment in traditional jobs. Such action, they think, will reduce racial friction and thereby increase production.
Persons indulging in this type of thinking have neglected two all-important factors: the manpower requirements of war production and the nature of the Negro community.
It is reliably estimated that 75 per cent of war jobs are skilled and semi-skilled. One tenth of the population cannot make its maximum contribution to the war effort if it is generally restricted to the remaining unskilled and service jobs. This is particularly true in areas where colored labor forms an appreciable segment of the unused manpower reserves. In many tight labor markets, segments of industry have already recognized this fact.
Accordingly, even in regions where there has been the firmest adherence to occupational caste lines, relaxations are painfully but slowly appearing. In a shipyard in Brunswick, Georgia, for example, skilled Negroes are being recruited. In the area of Hampton Roads, Virginia, as of February, four government establishments and the largest private contractor employed 2000 skilled and 7000 semiskilled Negroes. Shipyards in Mobile, Alabama, are recruiting Negro welders — and that occupation, from its inception in the industry, has traditionally been a white man’s job.
Outside the Deep South, the relaxation of occupational limitations has been more rapid and extensive. In Baltimore, Maryland, a leading shipyard employed some 10,000 Negroes in June. Of these, over 2000 were skilled men in a wide variety of occupations. Two years ago this yard employed only a few colored workers and restricted them to unskilled work. In the aircraft industry, where at the beginning of the defense program there was an announced and pronounced exclusionisl policy toward Negroes, over 65,000 colored men and women had found employment by the summer of 1943. Thousands of these were in production jobs.
Large industrial corporations have inaugurated company-wide programs for inducting and upgrading Negroes. A good example of this trend is offered by the Western Electric Company, which used few colored workers prior to Pearl Harbor and restricted them to unskilled and service jobs. From the fall of 1941 to January, 1943, Western Electric increased its Negro employees in its New Jersey plants from none to over 1200, A large proportion of these were women, and colored workers were employed in technical, clerical, skilled, and semi-skilled capacities. In the Baltimore plant, Negro employment grew from 10 unskilled workers in January, 1942, to over 700 employees in March, 1943. During the same period the company’s Chicago plant increased its colored labor force from approximately 30 to over 700.
Truly, management is beginning to realize the validity of the conclusion of the American Management Association: “Today’s urgent need for manpower effectively removes Negro employment in industry from the realm of social reform.”Labor unions outside the railroad industry are also responding to this urgent need for manpower through relaxations of the remaining exclusionist policies of certain organizations. For in some tight labor markets closed-shop agreements often break down when the union is unable to recruit workers through its machinery; work permits, second-class membership, and full acceptance of Negroes are resulting.
In the months to come these trends will continue, probably at an increasing tempo. America’s job is to recognize their necessity and to plan to direct thorn in an orderly manner.
In considering the Negro community, the important factor to remember is that Negroes are the objects of discrimination and segregation. In almost every instance there are certain phases of the colored man’s life in which he finds himself, his home, his amusements, or his thinking separated from the main stream of the nation.
When, in his quest for more of the rights of American citizenship, the Negro encounters occupational limitations, he is again reminded of his inferior status in America. He realizes that job discrimination is a part of a general picture which emphasizes that he does not belong — that his position is outside the main stream of American living.
At the outset of the defense program Negro leaders viewed with alarm the long-run economic implications of tying the Negro to restricted occupational and industrial patterns. They knew the immediate dangers of having WPA become almost exclusively a group of Negro projects. They were apprehensive of the apathy of Negroes toward the war. Experience had taught them that such results would haunt colored Americans in the future and become justification for extending patterns of discrimination.
They remembered World War I, when Negroes were brought into industrial areas and introduced into industrial employment only to be generally dismissed in the depression of the thirties. They united in pressing for training, employment, and upgrading in all war industries, and today the Negro community is no less dedicated to such a program. The fight for equal job opportunities is not the agitation of a few Negro radicals; it is the will of the Negro people.
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WHEN the Negro worker leaves his job he returns to a world of which it is difficult for the average white American to conceive. It is so similar to the rest of American life and yet so different. It is a world in which the same radio programs, daily newspapers, schoolbooks, Bible, and motion pictures enter. Yet it is a world in which most of the members are poor. Most of them work long hours. Most of them are held together by one bond — their status as Negroes. This in its fundamental features cuts across cultural levels, class lines, and economic position.
Negro status makes theirs a world apart; a world in which there are definite limitations based on color affecting all who live in it; a world in which the professional man, the white-collar worker, the skilled artisan, the common laborer, and the service worker all know that certain opportunities are closed to them. It is a world in which the fortunate few — a Joe Louis or a Marian Anderson — who get to the top are idols of the group. In this city within a city, where the majority of Negroes live, there are constant reminders that there is a “race problem” and that it affects and limits the inhabitants.
It is this separation and this feeling of being apart, supported by a multitude of individual experiences of being excluded, that have promoted certain characteristics which are often termed racial traits. Negro workers are said to be too aggressive, while in the next breath they are damned for being too submissive. Modern psychology has, of course, a valid explanation for aggressiveness. Usually it is a reaction to frustration. It appears in any group which is underprivileged and disadvantaged. It is not racial; it is human.
It should be unnecessary to reiterate the fact that colored people vary as much as white people. Years ago, when the matter of educating Negroes was a controversial issue, a leading white Southerner, when asked if he believed “in educating the Negro,” replied, “Which one?” There are Negroes with bad work habits. There are other Negroes with good ones. But the Negro is seldom judged by this latter group. Those who constitute it are considered the rare exceptions since they don’t fit the stereotyped conception which the press, radio, and moving pictures perpetuate.
The important thing in a war economy, however, is the fact that most of the undesirable traits which are attributed to Negroes — laziness and irresponsibility, tardiness and absenteeism, body odor and the like — are environmental and occupational rather than ethnological. Today, as all groups of workers face problems of inadequate housing and transportation,— chronic ills of the Negro, — the incidence of tardiness, absenteeism, and lack of interest in jobs transcends racial lines. It is a national problem. Workers of any race who are in heavy, dirty work have body odor. Any man or woman who has no hope of ever rising above common labor will not be so industrious as his fellow employee who can get advancement. Habitual low wages, uncertain income, and general economic insecurity breed irresponsibility. Tardiness and absenteeism, too, are often the result of industrial inexperience, hopelessness of promotion, and certain physical transportation difficulties.
Much has been written about the supposed undesirable work habits of Negroes. We know today that those are not racial characteristics and that they can be modified through fair employment practices. Lack of responsibility and laziness are most effectively counteracted when a worker, regardless of his race or color, is given a job for which he is qualified and has an opportunity for advancement in accordance with his abilities. Men and women who have prepared themselves for skilled or technical work cannot be expected to be vitally interested in a janitor’s or maid’s job — especially at a time when the radio and the press arc full of appeals for trained people to enter war production.
Workers who, because of the color line, cannot rise to production or skilled jobs regardless of their regularity, punctuality, or affability will hardly manifest these characteristics. Groups, such as the Negro, which have systematically been let out of jobs when the peak of labor demand has passed, can make their maximum efforts for war production only if they believe that the contribution which they now make will assure them a chance for equal job opportunities in the post-war economy. In a word, the causes of undesirable work habits must be known and understood, and handled by recognized methods of good personnel administration.
The American Management Association conducted an “off the record" panel discussion on the Negro worker at its Production Conference on November 10, 1942. Shortly after that meeting it published a Special Research Report, The Negro Worker, Some of the conclusions of this report, reflecting as they do the experience of enlightened personnel officers, are pertinent. They are: —
1. Negro workers have great potentialities: they . . . have responded to training for industrial employment.
2. Regardless of race or color, where accepted, good personnel procedures are employed, workers respond and satisfactory production may be expected.
3. There is some evidence of a relationship between the rate of absenteeism among Negroes and the character of the work assigned to them. The Association did not find any case in which absenteeism among Negroes was so high as to constitute a real handicap to their employment.
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THERE is, of course, another side of the picture. Absenteeism, regardless of its cause, is an enemy to production. Tardiness is a deadly slow-up factor in modern production. And fellow workers do not stop to analyze why a person is over-aggressive; they resent him. Excessive fraternizing on the job and lack of cleanliness are objectionable both to management and to serious employees.
When the offender in any of these particulars is an easily identified member of a minority group, his action is usually considered a “racial characteristic,” and the other members of the group are judged by him. It is not too much to ask that intelligent management analyze the situation carefully and take steps to deal with it effectively. Some managements — though by far too few — are doing so today. It is, however, impractical to assume that the mass of white workers will delve into the social institutions which have created certain habits in individuals.
A large section of Negro leadership and the Negro press realize these things. They see the immediate dangers incident to the display of undesirable work habits by some Negroes. They know, also, that to stress, even in Negro circles, the existence of these situations and give what some would call “constructive leadership” is to forge another weapon which will be used to justify the status quo in racial employment patterns. For it has long been the habit of those who would defend the exclusion of Negroes from many types of work to cite the failings of some Negroes as the reason for all racial limitations.
To meet this danger the colored weekly papers are devoting an increasing number of editorials and news stories to the matter. Negroes who have significant followings have discussed it in their speeches and writings. As there is marked improvement in the integration of Negroes in war industries, the Negro will within his own ranks turn more attention to this second phase of his fight to enter and to stay on the production lines of American industry.
To have stressed this side of the picture when a vast majority of Negroes, regardless of training and work habits, were being turned away from the gates of defense plants would have been most unfortunate. It would have fallen upon deaf ears and have been interpreted by the Negro people as an appeasement policy. Such an eventuality would have made subsequent appeals for self-improvement suspect. Today, however, it is possible and desirable to press government, management, and labor for more work opportunities for Negroes and at the same time to warn colored workers that they have a grave responsibility to prove their worth.
This is a project which demands the joint action of management and the Negro community. If Negroes are convinced that management is sincere in its efforts to establish fair employment policies and equal opportunities for advancement, there are many persons of influence who will join with management in improving the performance of colored workers. If the Negro community is sure that in this war, in contrast to World War I, the colored worker will not be relegated principally to the hot, the dirty, and the least secure jobs, and that this time he will have equal job security in peacetime employment, it will have a real incentive to plug for maximum efficiency from its members.
The interests of the Negro community and those of enlightened management are identical. Both want to make of the colored worker a successful and efficient producer. Working together they can do much to accomplish this end. Neither can succeed in this objective unless it has the confidence and support of the other.
The influence of group pressure upon efficiency is shown by a recent occurrence in Indianapolis. Although there is much machine work in that area, Negroes have participated little in it. One of the first companies to engage colored machine operators made a careful selection of a crew of ten Negroes for this training. Upon the completion of their course these men were assigned to machines. One of the group was unsatisfactory. His production was below the standard and showed little improvement as time went on.
The other nine operators called the matter to the attention of the management and requested that the inefficient worker be assigned to other duties. The management hesitated to take this action but the crew was adamant. At the third conference on the matter they stated their case simply and forcefully. The crew, they said, was on trial. They were being watched by the company and their fellow workers. The one slow and inefficient colored worker endangered their record and tended to destroy the respect of other workers which they hoped to build up. They insisted that management act — and they won their point.
The coöperation of the Negro community is necessary if we are to achieve full utilization of all labor. Such coöperation, however, cannot be effective unless it is met with understanding and is welcome. Negroes, by themselves, cannot secure full use of their labor resources; desirable work and behavior habits will not evolve or grow in a community which is continually discriminated against. Nor will such habits alone prevent racial tensions.
The immediate wartime necessity is to learn, community by community and as a nation, how to take rapid strides towards achieving equal economic opportunity for the Negro and, at the same time, to avoid the racial conflicts we have recently seen. Our whole tradition as a nation has been one of doing new things when we realized the necessity for taking the step. Making effective adjustments incident to the expansion of Negro employment in war production is but a part of a successful program for meeting the overall manpower problem. Both will require conviction and resolution.
One of the primary needs to meet the immediate necessities of wartime production and secure the full coöperation of the Negro community is to present the problem to the people of the nation in its true light. The upgrading of Negroes and the industrial employment of Negro women are not social experiments. They are wartime economic necessities. Every delay in the production of the vital instruments needed to carry on this war means unnecessary loss of American lives. It is not white men’s work we have to do — it is war work, and there is more than enough of it. These truths must be told and retold until they become a part of the average citizen’s thinking.
But what of the Negro worker after the war? Two principal factors will determine his economic status: the degree to which he is integrated into a wide variety of occupations, industries, firms, and labor unions at the close of hostilities and the type of post-war economy we are to have. A depressed economy has always meant but one thing for the Negro worker — widespread unemployment. If, however, he has a significant degree of occupational status, his chances are good for retaining a higher proportion of the more desirable jobs and suffering a lower intensity of job displacement than in the past. If we have an economy of full employment, it will establish a framework favorable to the continuing occupational advancement of the black worker and to the removal of the white worker’s fear of him as an economic rival.
Full employment in the post-war period will not remove racial tensions. It will set the economic stage for effective programs designed to reduce the frequency and intensity of one of the basic causes for race conflict. In such an economy trade-unions can, as some of them have so well done in the past few years, take the lead in establishing coöperation between white and black workers. Other agencies, both governmental and private, will find conditions more favorable for developing racial understanding and national unity.
And there will be important secondary results. Such an economy should provide better housing for all the people, better educational and recreational facilities, and more adequate transportation. Thus it would ease situations which are often serious irritants in areas of interracial contacts. Most important, however, is the fact that economic success will offer practical experience in relaxing the caste system which limits the Negro in America.