Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/32



of the question of work for colored people shows that it presents three important features; (i) the opening of doors to new occupations so that skilled men will not have to stay in the common labor group all their lives; (2) getting men and women trained to perform skilled or unskilled labor and coaching them when on a job so that they will hold on; (3) creating a sentiment among employers so that no colored man or woman will be dismissed merely because of race.

These three aspects of the colored man's labor problem are worthy of careful study. They go to the root of the most perplexing immediate phase of what is called the race problem. It is economic equality that gets the emphasis in the speeches and the writings of the colored people themselves. They hate Jim Crow cars and lynching and all acts of race discrimination, in part, because back of these is the big fact that, even in the north, in many skilled occupations, as well as in many unskilled, it is useless for any colored man or woman to ask a job. And so, from year to year, we find the organizations of colored people checking up, listing the new occupations they have entered, pointing to new doors opening to men on the basis of ability where color does not count one way or the other.

The new doors of opportunity opening in Chicago in the last two years, are told here: