Mediadores celulares de la fibrosis

In following his aspirations, the Negro has crossed over his Jordan in multitudes to a land of Canaan in America—a city named Detroit. (Detroit Free Press, 1957)

Both, the First and the Second World War created an economic boom in American industry which opened up previously unavailable opportunities to African Americans. As they began to pour into (mostly northern) industrial cities, leaving behind a racially oppressive and economically restricted context, they encountered new—if less overt—forms of racial discrimination hampering the economic progress of blacks as an ethnic group and thereby contributing to the evolvement of black urban ghettos.

- Employment Opportunities during WWI and WWII

In 1916, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations published a report which described the hiring process of black men in 1910, before the establishment of employment services in 1920.

There would be a long row out in front of the employment office as a rule anywhere from 200 to 1,000 men…. The employment agent would look over the group generally and pick out those who seemed to be the sturdiest and best fitted to do the unskilled work. So far as I could see there was no bargaining and discussion about wages, terms of employment, or anything of that sort. Just the employment agent would tap the one he wanted on the shoulder and say ‗Come along.‘ (US Commission on Industrial Relations qtd. in Grossman 187)

Finding a job through a newspaper advertisement was rare among black jobseekers prior to WWII. Most migrants found a position through personal referral, ―which was frequently an

extension of the same network that had facilitated the migratory process‖ (Grossman 185). Industrial employers usually felt that the personal recommendations provided them with at least a minimal amount of reference to their future employees since ―industrial managers knew as little about African Americans in 1916 as the migrants knew about northern factories‖ (Grossman 198). Most assumed, according to popular notions which were

sporadically voiced by various newspapers and journals, that the ―Negro Character‖ was lazy, unreliable, and slow. Accordingly, most industrial employers considered their labor contracts with blacks a temporary experiment at best. Given this vantage point, it is not surprising that a 1917 survey of 500 Illinois firms employing at least fifty blacks each, reported that only fifty percent intended to keep black workers on their payroll any longer than necessary (see Grossman 198).

Had it not been for the severe labor shortage during the war economies, therefore, blacks would have probably not been able to secure inroads into northern industry, as the New

Republic prophetically declared on the eve of the Great Migration: ―The Negro gets a chance

to work [in the North] only when there is no one else‖ (New Republic qtd. in Grossman 198). It was precisely this situation which presented itself to African Americans during WWI. In Chicago, both, the steel and the meat packing industry were constantly in need of labor. ―A Negro could always get a job in the stockyards,‖ a railroad porter recalled at a later point. ―They could go to the stockyards any day of the week and get a job‖ (Foster qtd. in Grossman 183). Grossman reports that, by 1918, the stockyards in Chicago employed between ten and twelve thousand black workers. The situation in Chicago‘s steel industry almost matched the stockyards in employment numbers. ―They were hiring day and night,‖ a former steel worker recalled years later. ―All they wanted to know was if you wanted to work and if you had a strong back‖ (Gottlieb qtd. in Grossman 184)

Most other industrial jobs available to black workers included food products industries (other than meat-packing), the Pullman Car shops, steam laundries, and a few tanneries (see

Grossman 184). Other types of work readily accessible to African American men in Chicago during the Great Migration could be found in the unskilled nonindustrial labor sector (such as laborers, porters, draymen, and teamsters) and in the service sector (as servants, waiters, or janitors). Female migrants were most likely to find employment in unskilled service occupations, as domestic servants and hand laundresses. Since most migrants arrived in the northern cities without any skills transferable to the urban industrial economy, they were content to start their ―career‖ on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Yet, those blacks

who had previously acquired an education—skilled craftsmen, teachers, or business

professionals—found themselves ranked on the same level as their untrained fellow migrants due to powerful labor organizations, discriminatory practices and a lack of private financial resources. Thus, while the northern industrial job market was decidedly welcoming to African Americans during the war time economic boom of both world wars, the employment options available to blacks were severely restricted. On the whole, black workers generally endured the worst conditions in any company as Grossman depicts in his description of black men working in the Chicago stockyards:

Most black men worked in the killing floors, cold storage areas, and loading docks. Amid hot temperatures and without ventilation, men in killing gangs stood on wet, slippery floors, as grease, old water, and warm blood flowed at their feet. In the beef casing room, where temperatures reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, one reformer reported that ‗ceilings are low, the artificial light bulbs unshaded and inadequate to illuminate the room. The few windows provide a bit of natural light only for a bench of workers seated beneath them. The majority of workers in this room are Negro men.‘ Black men laboring in the cold storage areas did not have to endure the heat; temperatures there ranged from 30 to 38 degrees. Beef luggers, who carried meat from the cooler to the loading area, had to bear continuous cold because carcasses loaded at room temperature might ―sweat.‖ It was easy for a migrant to get a job as a beef lugger; most white men refused to do it. (Grossman 189)

Black women did not fare much better as another description by Grossman depicts:

Relegated to positions left vacant by white women during the war-time labor shortage, black women toiled in some of the most noxious rooms in the packinghouses. The most unfortunate among them landed in the beef casing, beef tallow, mutton tallow, hog-killing, casing, packing, hog head, bone, and hair departments. Barred from the less unpleasant tasks of canning and wrapping, black women spent their days

inspecting, washing, grading and measuring casings; cutting bungs; washing

chitterlings; packing and trimming fat; and trimming lungs, hearts, kidneys, ovaries, paunch, snouts, and tongues. In the packing rooms these women wore coats to keep warm. In the trimming rooms at one medium-sized firm the only ventilation came from opening the outside doors, a harsh alternative during the winter when these rooms were already cold. In this company‘s ―newer‖ building, trimming room ventilation consisted of a door to another room. (Grossman 189-90)

Given these highly unpleasant working conditions, therefore, it is not surprising that migrants found it difficult to adjust to the rigid demands on their time and strength at the workplace, which severely undermined what they had considered their newly acquired freedom. Unfair ―color‖ treatment and outright discriminatory practices further demotivated blacks eager to climb the economic ladder and hampered the adjustment process.

Alarmed by complaints about the migrants‘ performance, old settlers in various cities started a ―campaign‖ to support the adaptation process of recent migrants to the industrial environment. The Chicago Defender summed up the perspective of Chicago‘s black establishment, who considered the prosperity of their fellow African Americans essential to their own

professional interests: ―Our entrance into factories, workshops and every other industry open to man places us on an entirely different footing; we become a factor in the economy to be reckoned with….We are on trial‖ (Chicago Defender qtd. in Grossman 200).

Thus, intent on increasing the migrants‘ work performance and efficiency, the National Urban League sought to inculcate values of punctuality, zeal, regularity, and ambition in black workers. Charles Johnson of the National Urban League described this undertaking as ―the recreation of the worker‖ (N.U.L. qtd. in Grossman 203)

In Detroit, the Urban League distributed cards to black factory workers which epitomized the message established northern blacks south to convey to new migrants:

WHY HE FAILED He watched the clock. He was always behindhand. He asked too many questions. His stock excuse was ―I forgot.‖ He wasn‘t ready for the next step. He did not put his heart in his work. He learned nothing from his blunders. He was content to be a second rater.

He didn‘t learn that the best part of his salary was not in his pay envelope-SUCCESS. (Crisis qtd. in Grosman 203)

Nevertheless, watching the clock and asking too many questions were not the main reasons why many blacks found themselves without employment in the decades to come. Instead, a decreasing demand for unskilled labor in the 1950s along with racially skewed hiring practices paved the way for large scale unemployment in black ghetto neighborhoods—an economic factor which is largely responsible for the development of impoverished inner-city neighborhoods and the intergenerational cycle of poverty among African Americans in these communities today.

- Employment Opportunities for African Americans: 1945 – 1965

World War II represented a turning point in black employment prospects. Due to the tight labor market many northern companies accepted blacks into their work force in

unprecedented numbers. The historian Thomas J. Sugrue identifies three factors which contributed to the opening of industrial jobs to African Americans during the 1940s: The chronic labor shortage during the war years and the postwar economic boom, the central role of unions and civil rights organizations in determining the terms on which blacks were hired, and Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s Executive Order 8802, mandating nondiscrimination in war industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (see Sugrue 26-7). Thus, the 1940s embodied a period of optimism for blacks, as well as for the country as a whole. The postwar boom in civilian production caused the unemployment rates in most major cities to remain at wartime low and hopes that the underlying causes of racial inequality—housing and employment—would eventually be resolved were high.

These high hopes had to give way to the economic reality of the 1950s when all major northeastern and midwestern industrial cities witnessed the beginning of a long-term and steady decline in manufacturing employment. The process of deindustrialization, which succeeded the abatement of the postwar economic boom and which was to restructure the economic landscape of most major U.S. cities, severely affected the employment

opportunities of African Americans.

Yet, while jobs were declining, migrants from the rural South were still pouring into northern cities, exacerbating the labor surplus. With the employment of the mechanical cotton picker after 1943, 2.3 million agricultural laborers were displaced, the majority of whom left the rural South. In the 1940s, the black population in Chicago increased by 77%, from 278.000 to 492.000 and in the 1950s numbers kept rising by 65% to 813.000. At one point 2.200 African Americans were moving to Chicago every week (see Leman 70). Thus, the high migration rates in the 1940s and 1950s coincided with a slackening off of the demand for unskilled labor, thereby raising the unemployment rates in the newly established cramped urban communities to unprecedented numbers.

Apart from the devastating effects of deindustrialization on employment opportunities for African American workers in the 1950s, blacks had to face the additional obstacle of racial discrimination in hiring practices. In his study of Detroit‘s postwar economy, Sugrue observes

that ―employment discrimination was manifest in the underrepresentation of African Americans in most of the city‘s better paid, safer, and higher-status jobs‖ (92). While black workers were disproportionately concentrated in low-wage secondary sector jobs, they barely had access to the coveted primary sector jobs involving skilled and semi-skilled work. Thus, blacks were often restricted to ―dead end‖ jobs which—due to separate seniority lines—did not allow them to move into better-paying positions (see Sugrue 92). Thus, the combination of the decrease in well-paying low-level manufacturing jobs, racially skewed employment practices, and the continuing influx of migrants from the South into northern cities set the stage for long-term and large-scale unemployment rates in black inner-city residential areas. Compounding the socio-economic downward spiral of African American urban communities in the postwar period were strict segregation practices in housing patterns. Backed by

neighborhood associations, these practices prevented blacks from moving outside of the ―designated‖ black ghetto areas—a fact which contributed significantly to the long-term development of black ghetto isolation.