tty offences which crowd them into the police courts. One finds also
sometimes a congestion in houses of dissipation and the carrying of
concealed weapons. Law abiding on the whole, however, they have not
experienced a wave of crime. The chief offences are those resulting from
the saloons and denizens of vice, which are furnished by the community
itself.
Disease has been one of their worst enemies, but reports on their health
have been exaggerated. On account of this sudden change of the Negroes
from one climate to another and the hardships of more unrelenting toil,
many of them have been unable to resist pneumonia, bronchitis and
tuberculosis. Churches, rescue missions and the National League on Urban
Conditions Among Negroes have offered relief in some of these cases. The
last-named organization is serving in large cities as a sort of clearing
house for such activities and as means of interpreting one race to the
other. It has now eighteen branches in cities to which this migration has
been directed. Through a local worker these migrants are approached,
properly placed and supervised until they can adjust themselves to the
community without apparent embarrassment to either race. The League has
been able to handle the migrants arriving by extending the work so as to
know their movements beforehand.
The occupations in which these people engage will throw further light on
their situation. About ninety per cent of them do unskilled labor. Only
ten per cent of them do semi-skilled or skilled labor. They serve as
common laborers, puddlers, mold-setters, painters, carpenters,
bricklayers, cement workers and machinists. What the Negroes need then is
that sort of freedom which carries with it industrial opportunity and
social justice. This they cannot attain until they be permitted to enter
the higher pursuits of labor. Two reasons are given for failure to enter
these: first, that Negro labor is unstable and inefficient; and second,
that white men will protest. Organized labor, however, has done nothing to
help the blacks. Yet it is a fact that accustomed to the easy-going toil
of the plantation, the blacks have not shown the same efficiency as that
of the whites. Some employers report, however, that they are glad to have
them because they are more individualistic and do not like to group. But
it is not true that colored labor cannot be organized. The blacks have
merely been neglected by organized labor. Wherever they have h
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