.

Despite these difficulties, the Negro laborers are not giving up the
fight for their admittance into the unions. In various ways they are
still opposing these forces which are barring them from these
organizations. In the meantime they are availing themselves of the aid
of certain Negro social agencies which have undertaken to supply the
Negro workers with that industrial leadership which they lack by being
outside the labor unions. These agencies are the Young Men's Christian
Association, Young Women's Christian Association, and the National
Urban League. These bodies function through their respective
industrial secretaries in cities of the North and West. These agencies
aim to serve the Negro laborers by investigating and cultivating new
avenues of employment, to stand as a buffer between them and the white
unions and furnish the leadership usually exercised by trades unionism
by taking up the Negro's grievances directly with the management. That
these objects may be accomplished these organizations have adopted
certain methods of procedure. Most of them operate free employment
offices through which from several hundred to two thousand laborers
are placed per month. The Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh
branches of the National Urban League, and the Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, and Columbus Y. M. C. A. branches render still broader
service by studying the demand for labor and by endeavoring to
persuade employers to use Negroes in new capacities. They try also to
aid men to make good on the job by appealing to race pride, by holding
noon shop-meetings, and by stimulating the companies to cultivate
friendly relationship between labor and the management. These bodies,
by acting as mediators in labor disputes, moreover, have been
successful in averting or settling a number of minor strikes.[122]

Finally, if by some means the American Federation of Labor should
succeed in compelling its affiliated unions to abolish the color line
in their respective constitutions and admit the Negro to full
membership in their unions, the Negro will be granted a right long
denied him, the right of working on terms of equality with the other
race, if he can demonstrate his competence to do so. It will give him
a chance to enter all of the skilled and therefore better paid trades
and the opportunity to be judged on his merits in them. If this
barrier of race discrimination is thoroughly broken down, moreover,
there will be open