Negroes were engaged in domestic and personal service. There
was nothing else to do. Then the fashion had changed in servants as Irish and Swedish and German tides came on. An
unfortunate experience with the unions lost for Negroes the
best positions in their traditional strongholds as waiters and
poisoned their minds against organized labor. Racial exclusiveness, tradition and inexperience, kept them out of industry. Then a strike at the stockyards and the employers
miraculously and suddenly discovered their untried genius,
while the unions elected to regard them as deliberate miscreants lowering wage standards by design and taking white
men’s jobs. Smoldering resentment. But with the war and
its labor shortage, they came on in torrents. They overran
the confines of the old area and spread south in spite of the
organized opposition of Hyde Park and Kenwood, where objection was registered with sixty bombs in a period of two
years. Passions flamed and broke in a race riot unprecedented
for its list of murders and counter-murders, its mutilations and
rampant savagery; for the bold resistance of the Negroes to
violence. Then gradually passions fired by the first encounter
subsided into calm and the industries absorbed 80 per cent of
the working members.
Before the deluge, New York City, too, lacked that lusty vigor of increase, apart from migration, which characterized the Negro population as a whole. In sixty years, its increase had been negligible. Time was when that small cluster of descendants of the benevolent old Dutch masters and of the free Negroes moved with freedom and complacent importance about the intimate fringe of the city’s active life. These Negroes were the barbers, caterers, bakers, restaurateurs, coachmen—all highly elaborated personal service positions. The crafts had permitted them wide freedom; they were skilled artisans. They owned businesses which were independent of Negro patronage. But that was long ago. This group in 1917 was rapidly passing, its splendor shorn. The rapid evolution of business, blind to the amenities on which they flourished, had devoured their establishments, unsupported and weak in capital resources; the incoming hordes of
