Probably ninety percent of the Negroes employed in manufacturing and mechanical occupations and in trade and transportation, are doing unskilled work.

The upward strides of the Negro are shown most clearly in his rise as a proprietor. From the standpoint of the capital involved his greatest success is the organization and management of insurance companies. The total assets of Negro insurance companies are estimated at $6,500,000. These companies cover the field of life, fire, and sickbenefit insurance, and they are all located in the South except two companies in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, and two in Illinois.

There are seventy-two Negro banks in the United States, with a total capital of $2,500,000. All are located in the South except two in Massachusetts and two in Illinois.

Negro proprietors of smaller enterprises are as follows: Restaurant and café keepers, 6,369; grocers, 5,550; hucksters and peddlers, 3,434 ; builders and contractors, 3,107; butchers and meat dealers, 2,957; coal and wood dealers, 1,155; hotel keepers, 973; undertakers, 953; billiard and pool-room keepers, 875; real-estate dealers, 762; proprietors of general stores, 736; proprietors of drug stores, 695; proprietors of drygoods stores, 280.

There are a number of Negroes engaged in manufacturing. In Durham, North Carolina, there is a textile mill which manufactures hosiery, the product being sold by white salesmen in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and New York. "So far as I have heard," said Booker Washington, "there has been no man to raise the color question when he put on a pair of these hose made by Negroes." 16 There are in Durham also two brick factories, and an iron foundry turning out plows, laundry heaters, and so forth.

Elsewhere in the South one may come upon Negro proprietors of saw mills and clothing factories, but as yet Negro ventures in the line of manufacturing have been few and of a petty character.

Altogether about 60,000 businesses of one kind or another are conducted by Negroes. These have organized a National Business League with the object of stimulating the development of Negro enterprises. This league has branches in all of the Southern states and also in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, Colorado, and California. Annual meetings are held in various parts of the country. Negroes who show any enterprise or thrift, and conduct themselves well, find plenty of encouragement from the whites. For example, John MerIndependent, Vol. 70, p. 624.

rick, the leading Negro of Durham, North Carolina, started on his career with money loaned to him by General Julian S. Carr. He is now the largest Negro owner of real estate in the city. He has been interested in insurance and banking, in the establishment of a Negro hospital, and in the upbuilding of the Negro church to which he belongs. The esteem in which he is held by the white people is attested by the fact that when his daughter was married "more than three hundred of the best white people were present, bringing with them costly presents for the bride.” 17

Another rich Negro in the same town, R. B. Fitzgerald, owes his success almost entirely to Southern white men. Mr. Blackwell, the great tobacco manufacturer, once said to him, "Fitzgerald, get all the Negroes and mules you can and make brick. I will take all you can make." Fitzgerald followed the instruction and to-day he not only turns out 30,000 bricks a day from his $17,000 plant, but he owns besides 100 acres of land within the city limits, and has $50,000 worth of real estate.18

White people will purchase without hesitation a Negro-manufactured product and will often patronize Negro retail stores. Referring again to Durham, North Carolina, Booker T. Washington says, "Each groceryman, each textile manufacturer, each tailor, in fact, all the Negro tradesmen and business men numbered many white customers among their most substantial purchasers." 19

The author of this book used to know a Negro, Paul Barringer, who owned 100 houses in Concord, North Carolina, also a grocery store, which he personally conducted. Practically all of his customers were white. Scott Bond, an ex-slave and negro merchant in Madison, Arkansas, said in his address to the American Negro Business League, "Both black and white patronize us, and I want to say, to the credit of the Southern white man, the chance for a negro to succeed in the South, in a business way, is as good as it can possibly be anywhere." 20

"Washington, "Durham, North Carolina, a City of Negro Enterprise," Independent, Vol. 70, p. 624.

25 Washington, op. cit.

"Ibid., p. 643.

"Weatherford, Negro Life in the South, p. 52.

CHAPTER 12

DOMESTIC AND SOCIAL LIFE OF THE NEGRO

Negro Quarters in Cities-Looseness of Family Ties-Handicap of Negro Mothers in Having to Work Away from Home and Support the Family—Short Period of Infancy-Progress in the Development of Chastity in Spite of Adverse Conditions-Rich and Varied Social Life

THE

HE domestic life of the Negroes, like that of the white people, is seen at its best in the rural districts. The members of the family, being dependent upon each other, develop strong family ties. The children, being constantly under parental oversight, are better grounded in habits of industry and better disciplined than children in the cities, whose parents live generally in overcrowded houses and often work away from home. For the Negroes, as for the whites, one drawback to rural life is that the educational opportunities are not so good as in the cities, but this drawback does not counterbalance the many advantages which rural life offers. It would be better for our people if more white people, as well as more Negroes, lived in the country.

The social life of the Negroes in the country consists mainly of the Saturday visits to the nearest town and the Sunday visits to the nearest Negro church. In some districts, however, the rural people have social clubs, and attend lodge meetings in the towns.

The tenant and wage class of Negroes change residence too often to form any valuable connection with the rural church, social club, or town lodge.

In the cities of the South, the Negroes generally reside in segregated quarters. In Baltimore there are several such quarters, some of them comparing favorably with respectable residential districts of the whites. In Richmond, Virginia, the Negro quarter embraces a large area of two-story brick residences formerly occupied by whites. From the general appearance of the streets and houses, one would take the quarter to be that of the middle class of whites. In every large Southern city there are very respectable Negro residential neighborhoods.

In most of the cities the several Negro quarters represent different classes of the Negro population. In one quarter you see substantial

and attractive houses owned and occupied by the more prosperous and educated class of Negroes. In another quarter you see dilapidated houses occupied by the thriftless class and the vicious class. The former quarter is predominantly mulatto. The latter quarter is more strictly black, and is usually designated by some such derisive name as the Bowery, Sheriff's Hill, Snow Hill, Haiti, Buzzard's Roost, etcetera. The mulattoes form a sort of aristocratie de couleur, and stand aloof from the blacks.

In many towns there is something of the same kind of antipathy between the mulattoes and the blacks that one finds in the Republic of Haiti. Mulattoes generally intermarry among themselves, and the increasing proportion of mulattoes in our population is due mainly to the illicit relationship between the mulattoes and blacks, and between the whites and blacks.

Upon the whole more Negroes than whites marry, and widows and widowers more often remarry. A bachelor or spinster is rare among the Negroes. However, the marriage bond is more often broken. among the Negroes than among the whites. The reasons for this are that husbands and wives are often unfaithful and both are extremely jealous, that the wives are not dependent on their husbands, and are therefore free to leave them for any good reason, and that the work of the husbands and wives often forces them to live apart, thus favoring intrigue with chance acquaintances. According to an investigation made of 101 families in a low-class Negro quarter in Durham, North Carolina, forty of the women represented themselves as widows. The fact was that for various reasons these women had left their husbands or had been abandoned by them. A survey of a Negro neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, showed that "of 649 families, 209, or more than 32 per cent are separated." 1

1

Under the matrilineal form of the family in Africa, the children take the name of the mother, who by custom supports them and also her husband. This African custom seems to have survived to a considerable extent among a type of Negroes of to-day, and is often the subject of comment.2 The Negro author Thomas says that "in all of our cities, North and South, there is a large class of freedwomen who, by their unaided efforts, pay their house rent, and feed and clothe their children, while their dissolute husbands roam about in wanton idleMartin, Our Negro Population, p. 124.

1

'Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 141; Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, p. 156.

ness." A survey of a Negro quarter in Kansas City, Missouri, brought out the fact that "The mother spends much less on her clothing than the father." The practice of Negro cooks in carrying home the customary basket of left-overs is partly due to the disposition of Negro husbands to throw the support of the family upon their wives. A Negro cook who has been in the service of my family for thirty years, and has kept up the basket habit, says that her husband has rarely contributed anything to pay house rent or buy clothing or provisions for the family. Among the more prosperous and educated class of Negroes, the husbands support their families after the manner of white husbands.

Negro children in cities have little opportunity to grow up strong physically or morally. In many cases the mother works away from home. The percentage of Negro females in the South who work for a living is about four times as great as that of white females (41.3 percent for Negro females and 11.8 percent for white females). The mother who works away from home has neither the time nor the disposition to be a home-maker. Infants, being left alone, learn to crawl and walk much earlier than white infants, and learn to talk much later. Children from four to ten years old often have the daily care of the younger ones. The mother rushes off to work and often leaves nothing for the children's breakfast except left-overs from the last meal. Often the only regular meal is at night when the mother brings home her basket or hurriedly buys something at the market. At times the children have not enough and, as often, too much to eat, and they seldom have food of the right sort. Milk is rare in the average Negro home; hence the frequency of rickets. Children and adults often sleep three or four in a bed; they have no night robes and go many days without a change of underwear. There is a general absence of privacy in the home, and when the parents are away the children take to the streets, where they come in contact with moral degenerates and acquire familiarity with all the vices and vulgarities.

The period of infancy of the Negro child is short. Among urban Negroes, parental care hardly extends to the age of fifteen. Before that time the boys usually leave home, tired of parental restraints and longing for independence and for wages to spend on themselves. The girls also leave home at an early age, lured away by the love of flashy 'The American Negro, p. 189.

'Martin, op. cit., p. 72.