While
there has been a large increase in the number of negroes engaged in
agriculture, there has at the same time been a very marked current
from the smaller communities to the new industrial cities of the South
and to some of the manufacturing centers of the North. In recent years
there have been wholesale importations of negro laborers into many
Northern cities and towns, sometimes as strike breakers but more
frequently to supply the urgent demand for unskilled labor. Many of
the smaller manufacturing towns of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Illinois, and Indiana are accumulating a negro population.
Very few of these industrial negroes, however, are skilled workers.
They toil rather as ordinary day laborers, porters, stevedores,
teamsters, and domestics. There has been a great deal written of the
decline of the negro artisan. Walter F. Willcox, the eminent
statistician, after a careful study of the facts concludes that
economically "the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined
more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and
is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the
country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives."
It appears, therefore, that the pathway of emancipation has not led
the negro out of the ranks of humble toil and into racial equality.
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