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“Blacks, though native born, were arriving as the poorest people from the poorest section of the country with the least access to the worst education. Over the decades of the Migration, they came with every disadvantage and found themselves competing not only with newcomers like themselves but with second- and third-generation European immigrants already established in apprenticeships and factory jobs that were closed off to black migrants, the immigrants and their children permitted into the very trade unions that prohibited black citizens from joining. Because they were largely excluded from well-paying positions in even unskilled occupations and were concentrated in servant work and other undesirable jobs, blacks were the lowest paid of all the recent arrivals. In 1950, blacks in the North and West made a median annual income of $1,628, compared to Italian immigrants, who made $2, 295, Czechs, who made $2,339, Poles, who made $2,419, and Russians, who made $2,717. ‘There is just no avoiding the fact that blacks were more severely discriminated against in the labor market and elsewhere,’ Lieverson wrote. They ‘had to work more hours to earn less money than anyone else,’ the historian Gilbert Osofsky wrote… The presence of so many black migrants elevated the status of other immigrants in the North and West. Black southerners stepped into a hierarchy that assigned them a station beneath everyone else, no matter that their families had been in the country for centuries. Their arrival unwittingly diverted anti-immigrant antagonism their way, as they were an even less favored outsider group than the immigrants they encountered in the North and helped make formerly ridiculed groups more acceptable by comparison.”—
Isabel Wikerson, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, pg 419 (via zoratonimaya)
i’ll keep this handy for the next person insisting that black folks only needed to “learn a trade”
(via deluxvivens)
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