African-American soldiers who returned from the war could not get jobs, for example, in a white man’s liquor store in Chicago or New York. Yet, there was reason to escape from the South, where some blacks had been lynched in their uniforms in the terrible summer of 1919. Even public-spirited social workers in many cases appear not to have advanced beyond Jefferson’s view about the inherent inferiority of blacks. It was a time when blaming the victim was accepted as an explanation for caste or, at the least, second-class citizenship for African-Americans. C. Vann Woodward wrote that public-spirited professionals “laid great stress on the alarming increase in Negro crime as the race flocked to the cities and packed into crowded, filthy sums. Convinced that the race was rapidly deteriorating in morals and manners, in health and efficiency … they resolved that the Negro was incapable of self government, unworthy of the franchise.”48
When Woodrow Wilson, a self-proclaimed reformer and progressive, was elected president, the hopes of African-Americans, who seem to have shifted to the Democratic candidate in the 1912 election, were raised. But Wilson actually strengthened the caste system by reintroducing segregation in several federal departments. At least three of his cabinet members were sympathetic to the arguments of the so-called “National Democratic Fair Play Association,” to the effect that great harm would come to the country if the 24,500 blacks employed by the federal government were permitted to continue to work in integrated settings among their 465,000 white fellow employees.49
Wilson staunchly defended the official policy of segregation in personal letters to his old friend Oswald Garrison Villard, the publisher, who was an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He told a Negro delegation that federal segregation was necessary because of friction between blacks and whites. Leading the delegation was William Monroe Trotter, one of the founders of the Niagara Movement (the civil rights organization begun in 1905 on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls that led to the founding of the NAACP) and editor of an African-American paper, the Boston Guardian. He told the president that unless the policy of segregation was changed Wilson would lose Negro support at the polls. Wilson dismissed Trotter’s words as an empty threat, and the federal government continued a policy of segregating blacks in “the less desirable rooms, the inconveniently located lavatories, the poorly lit alcoves.”50
Washington, D.C., was essentially a southern city, but segregation increased in northern cities as well. There was, in Stanley Lieberson’s phrase, “a hardening in white attitudes toward black schooling” in the 1920s, as more blacks moved to the North.51 In Cleveland, for example, the curricula for predominantly black schools and classes shifted away from academic subjects to vocational training. More emphasis was placed on sewing, cooking, manual labor, foundry and sheet and metal work. Central High School, which was serving 61 percent of Cleveland’s black high school students by 1930, provided mathematics instruction to fewer than half of its tenth graders; it dropped classes in Spanish, German, bookkeeping, and stenography, and in its home economics classes emphasized laundry work.52 Blacks with high school degrees found themselves relegated to lowest-status jobs. Education provided little reward for blacks as compared to whites, especially after the onset of the Great Depression.53
The Depression: Tightening the Boundaries of Caste
During the great industrial expansion in the North between 1910 and 1930, the black male labor force in the region more than doubled to 480,000.54 Many became longshoremen, garage workers, truck drivers, and deliverymen. Others found jobs in the iron, steel, machinery, automobile, and railroad industries. In railroads, they were kept at unskilled work. Even before 1910, they had entered several industries as strikebreakers, working the docks in Baltimore, and in the iron and steel industries in western Pennsylvania.55 In Detroit, the Ford Motor Company offered a wide range of blue-collar jobs to black workers beginning in the 1920s; they were later organized by the United Auto Workers of America.56 In industries such as utility companies blacks were not hired at all.
Even in the North, blacks were shut out from craft labor unions and often were forced to establish unions of their own.57 Exceptions rarely did more than blunt the edge of the color line, even in industrial unions. Although the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workers Union admitted blacks on the basis of equality with whites, many of the other twelve crafts in the packing industry excluded them.58 Between 1882 and 1900 there were at least fifty strikes by whites against the hiring of blacks, which, according to labor historian Herbert Hill, kept them from highly paid skilled work in most industries for decades to come.59 “The less attractive and lower paid jobs” went “to the black man.”60
One union that appeared to open opportunity to blacks in the late 1920s was the Jewish-led International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but, in Philadelphia, some native-born American white women refused to work alongside blacks. In New York, where Jews were particularly active in the ILGWU and where a disproportionate number of blacks were West Indian immigrants, blacks occasionally were elected shop chairmen and used as organizers.61 But even in that most liberal of unions, the top leadership was white until the 1970s, and Hill’s statement that in the early decades of the twentieth century “the aim of white labor organizations to restrict black workers to the lowest rungs of the job ladder was increasingly successful” has been amply documented.62
The Depression ravaged most of the economic gains blacks had made in the early 1920s. John Bodnar’s study of a small steel town shows how the position of blacks, which in 1920 had been stronger there than that of Slavs and Italians, was considerably weakened as blacks became more numerous. Although a greater percentage of blacks than Slavs and Italians were semiskilled in 1920, 40 percent of the Slavs and Italians had become semiskilled by 1939, compared to 27 percent of the blacks.63
Unemployment actually was higher in the North than in the South during the Depression, but southern blacks continued to migrate, although at a much lower rate than in the previous ten years. In the North, blacks had more personal freedom, better wages if they could find a job, and a modicum of government relief if they could not. The caste system itself could be challenged openly, at least by intellectuals, teachers, and social workers and some politicians who courted African-American voters. But in the North blacks were segregated in the most deteriorated neighborhoods, where, unaccustomed to northern winters and separated from family and often from their church and professional black leadership, blacks were in some ways worse off than they had been in the South. As early as October 1933, as many as 40 percent of blacks in several large urban centers were on relief, three or four times as many as whites, and by the late 1930s, when sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton made their intensive study of blacks in Chicago, the situation had become even worse.64
Drake and Cayton found that “caste” existed in “watered down form” in Chicago and elsewhere in the North.65 By the mid-1930s, white Chicago was organized to keep Negroes in their place. Three such groups were some American Federation of Labor unions in skilled trades, certain railroad brotherhoods, and, most important, an association of neighborhood property owners in alliance with the Chicago Real Estate Board and the Chicago Title and Trust Company.66 Blacks in Chicago made gains in voting and political power; yet, the overwhelming majority were still subordinated to menial jobs if employed at all, and they were the first fired and the last hired. Those few African-Americans who did what the authors called “clean work” were almost entirely confined to the black ghetto, and, even before the Depression, more than twenty-five of every hundred Negro men and fifty-six of every hundred Negro women were doing some kind of servant work, or four times their proportionate share.67 Those men working at manual labor were confined overwhelmingly to the lowest-paid, dirtiest, and heaviest of jobs.68 That was the main point of caste! The black poet Langston Hughes wrote sardonically in 1936, “I am the Negro, servant to you all.”69
When