CHAPTER IX.

THE OCCUPATIONS OF NEGROES.

22. Occupations in the Seventh Ward.--Of the 257 boys between the ages of ten and twenty, who were regularly at work in 1896, 39 per cent were porters and errand boys; 25.5 per cent were servants; 16 per cent were common laborers, and 19 per cent had miscellaneous employment. The occupations in detail are as follows:¹

Of the men twenty-one years of age and over, there were in gainful occupations, the following:

Total male population, 21 and over . . . . . 3850.²

This shows that three-fourths of the male Negroes ten years of age and over in gainful occupations are laborers and servants, while the remaining fourth is equally divided into three parts: one to the trades, one to small business enterprises, and one to professional men, clerks and miscellaneous employments.

Turning now to the females, ten to twenty years of age, we have:

Of the 289 at work there were:

Taking the occupations of women twenty-one years of age and over, we have:

Total female population 2 and over . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3740. ⁴

Leaving out housewives who do no outside work and scheduling all women over twenty-one who have gainful occupations, we have:

The following tables gather up all these statistics and give full returns with distinctions of age and sex:

OCCUPATIONS--MALES, TWENTY-ONE YEARS AND OVER

SEVENTH WARD, 1896

OCCUPATIONS--Continued

*Intermarried white man

OCCUPATIONS--Continued

Let us now glance at the occupations as a whole: of the 9675 Negroes in the Seventh Ward, 1212 are children nine years of age or less. Of the remaining 8463 there are:

The 6610 at work are distributed as follows:

We can grasp the true meaning of these figures only by comparing the distribution of occupations among the Negroes with that of the total population of the city; for this purpose we must redistribute tile occupations according to the simpler, but in many respects unsatisfactory, divisions of the United States census. We then have:

* Omitting 24 students 21 years of age and over.

Illustrated graphically, this is:

Comparing the whole population with the Negroes of the Seventh Ward by sex, we have:

In these statistics and tables we have first to notice the large proportion of these people who work for a living; taking the population ten years of age and over, and we have 78 per cent for the Negroes of the Seventh Ward and 55.1 per cent for the whole city, white and colored. This is an indication of an absence of accumulated wealth, arising from poverty and low wages; the general causes of poverty are largely historical and well known; to appreciate the cause of low wages, we have only to see the few occupations to which the Negroes are practically limited, and imagine the competition that must ensue. This is true among the men, and especially true among the women, where the limitation is greatest. All the forces that are impelling white women to become breadwinners, are emphasized in the case of Negro women: their chances of marriage are decreased by the low wages of the men and the large excess of their own sex in the great cities; they must work, and if there are few chances open they must suffer from competition in wages. Among the men low wages means either enforced celibacy or irregular and often dissipated lives, or homes where the wife and mother must also be a bread-winner. Statistics curiously illustrate this; 16.3 per cent of the native white women

THE: WORKING POPULATION OR PHILADELPHIA, 1890.

of native parents and of all ages, in Philadelphia are breadwinners; ⁵ their occupations are restricted, and there is great competition; yet among Negro women, where the restriction in occupation reaches its greatest limit, nevertheless 43 per cent are bread-winners, and their wages are at the lowest point in all cases save in some lines of domestic service where custom holds them at certain figures; even here, however, the tendency is downward.

The causes of this peculiar restriction in employment of Negroes are twofold: first, the lack of training and experience among Negroes; second, the prejudice of the whites. The first is to be expected in some degree, although undoubtedly carelessness and culpable inefficiency have played their part. The second cause will be discussed at length, later. One point, however, needs mention: the peculiar distribution of employments among whites and Negroes makes the great middle class of white people seldom, if ever, brought into contact with Negroes--may not this be a cause as well as an effect of prejudice ?

Another noticeable fact is the absence of child-labor; this is not voluntary on the part of the Negroes, but due to restricted opportunity; there is really very little that Negro children may do. Their chief employment, therefore, is found in helping about the house while the mother is at work. Thus those children scheduled as at home represent child-labor in many cases.

ENDNOTES:

¹ The returns as to occupations are on the whole reliable. There was in the first place little room for deception, since the occupations of Negroes are so limited that a false or indefinite answer was easily revealed by a little judicious probing; moreover there was little disposition to deceive, for the Negroes are very anxious to have their limited opportunities for employment known; thus the motives of pride and complaint balanced each other fairly well. Some error of course remains: the number of servants and day workers is slightly understated; the number of caterers and men with trades is somewhat exaggerated by the answers of men with two occupations: e.g., a waiter with a small side business of catering returns himself as caterer; a carpenter who gets little work and makes his living largely as a laborer is sometimes returned as a carpenter, etc. In the main the errors are small and of little consequence.

² A more detailed list of the occupations of male Negroes, twenty-one years of age and over, living in the Seventh Ward in 1896, is as follows:

Entrepreneurs.

In Learned Professions.

In the Skilled Trades.

Clerks, Semi-Professional and Responsible Workers.

Servants.

Laborers (Select Class).

Laborers (Ordinary).

Miscellaneous.

³ This includes 12 housewives who also work.

⁴ A more detailed list of the occupations of female Negroes, twenty-one years of age and over, living in the Seventh Ward in 1896, is as follows:

Entrepreneurs.

Learned Professions.

Skilled Trades.

Clerks, Semi-Professional and Responsible Workers.

Laborers, etc.

Servants

Domestic Servants . . . . . . . . . . . . 1262

⁵ A better comparison here would be made by finding the percentages of the population above 10 years of age; statistics unfortunately are not available for this.

From W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro. New York: Lippincott, 1899, Chapter VIII, pp. 99-111.

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