Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/42

32. In one residence a colored woman employs seven girls, who come to the house every day and make lamp shades, which are later delivered to a contractor. The first week in July thirty girls were placed in one millinery shop.

A notable recent development, partly incidental to conditions of war industry, is the entrance of colored women into garment factories, particularly where women's and children's garments are made. In Chicago in the last year they have been assigned to the operation of power machines making children's clothes, women's apparel, overalls and rompers.

Out of 170 firms in Chicago that employed colored women for the first time during the war, 42, or 24 per cent, were hotels or restaurants, which hired them as kitchen help or bus girls. Twenty-one, or 12 per cent, were hotels or apartment houses which hired them as chambermaids. Nineteen laundries, 12 garment-factories, seven stores, and eight firms, hiring laborers and janltresses, make up the rest of the 170. The packing industry, of course, leads all others in employment of both colored men and women as workers. Occupations that engaged still others during the war were picture framers, capsule makers, candy wrappers, tobacco strippers, noodle makers, nut shellers, furniture sandpaperers, corset repairers, paper box makers. Ice cream cone strippers, poultry dressers and bucket makers.

In a building near the public library is a colored woman who conducts a hair-dressing parlor. She employs three white girls. All the patrons are white. The proprietress herself could easily pass for a Brazilian banana planter's widow, of Spanish Caucasian blood. But as she frankly admits that she is one-eighth African and