Demosthenian Shield_, _The National Reformer_, _The Pittsburg
Mystery_, _The Palladium of Liberty_, _The Disfranchised American_,
_The Colored Citizen_, _The National Watchman_, _The Excelsior_,
_The Christian Herald_, _The Farmer_, _The Impartial Citizen_, _The
Northern Star_ of Albany, and The _North Star_ of Rochester.]

CHAPTER XII

VOCATIONAL TRAINING

Having before them striking examples of highly educated colored men
who could find no employment in the United States, the free Negroes
began to realize that their preparation was not going hand in hand
with their opportunities. Industrial education was then emphasized as
the proper method of equipping the race for usefulness. The advocacy
of such training, however, was in no sense new. The early anti-slavery
men regarded it as the prerequisite to emancipation, and the
abolitionists urged it as the only safe means of elevating the
freedmen. But when the blacks, converted to this doctrine, began to
enter the higher pursuits of labor during the forties and fifties,
there started a struggle which has been prolonged even into our day.
Most northern white men had ceased to oppose the enlightenment of the
free people of color but still objected to granting them economic
equality. The same investigators that discovered increased facilities
of conventional education for Negroes in 1834 reported also that there
existed among the white mechanics a formidable prejudice against
colored artisans.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention for the
Improvement of the Free People of Color_, p. 26.]

In opposing the encroachment of Negroes on their field of labor the
northerners took their cue from the white mechanics in the South. At
first laborers of both races worked together in the same room and at
the same machine.[1] But in the nineteenth century, when more white
men in the South were condescending to do skilled labor and trying to
develop manufactures, they found themselves handicapped by competition
with the slave mechanics. Before 1860 most southern mechanics,
machinists, local manufacturers, contractors, and railroad men with
the exception of conductors were Negroes.[2] Against this custom
of making colored men such an economic factor the white mechanics
frequently protested.[3] The riots against Negroes occurring in
Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington during the thirties
and forties owed their origin mainly to an ill feeling be