Northern Negro
Black Metropolis. By Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake. (Jonathan Cape. 18s.) THIS is not one of those sultry, sordid stories of the life of the Southern negro which are having a vogue in the United States just now, but a semi-sociological study of the growth and the problems of the Black Belt in Chicago, the second negro city in the United States. It is a useful supplement to Professor Gunnar Myrdal's classical work on the colour question, since it furnishes a mass of facts and figures illustrating the effects of urbanisation on the negro and his struggle to climb the social and industrial ladders in a great northern city.
Throughout the book there runs a note of subdued passion, an undercurrent of protest against the inequalities and injustices im- posed upon the coldured population by their white neighbours of all nationalities in the most cosmopolitan city in the world. The negro flight from the south to Chiclago began in the Civil War, but by 19oo there were still only 3o,000 coloured people in the city, less than 2 per cent. of its total population. Then came the second and greater migration during the first world war, when labour was at a premium owing to the stoppage of immigration and the demands of war production. The negro was called in to replace the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians, the Hungarians, the Yugoslays and the other immigrants who were no longer flowing in to fill the unskilled jobs in the plants and stockyards of the booming mid-western capital. The efforts of the Southern States were powerless to bar the negro exodus. The Black Belt gradually ate its way into the heart of the city despite race-riots and bombs and the frantic attempts of the white owners of property to erect legal barricades against the sale of houses to negroes. By ][944 the coloured population numbered 337,000, of whom 90 per cent. were crowded into the black island city of the metropolis, containing nearly one-tenth of its inhabitants.
The negro had won an unshakeable foothold, but a segregated foothold which, as Professor Myrdal said, " involves a substantial element of discrimination." The struggle against discrimination goes relentlessly on. Its main objectives are to secure more ample living space, better education, equal opportunities of employment and the removal of the " job-ceiling " which debars the negro from the higher grades of industry.
This book shows clearly enough that despite all obstacle,s the negro has moved markedly upwards in the last twenty-five years, thanks mainly to the use othis-political power and to the action of the C.I.O. In 1928 the first coloured Congressman was sent to the Capitol from Chicago. A State Senator, four State Representatives, two aldermen and a city judge were elected by the Black Belt, and in 1945 a Bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly for the establish- ment of a Board of Fair Employment Practice for the suppression of discrimination agog' ist the employment of negroes. On the indus- trial side the ,C.I.O. organised black and white workers alike in the steel and packing plants, with the result that the barriers guarding the higher-paid ranks of industrY: against negro infiltration are slowly giving way.
That is the most significant feature of "Black Metropolis." In Chicago as in other northern cities the status of the negro is gradually rising. There is no comprehensive dt ready-made solution for the colour-problem any more than there is for the Palestine or the Indian problem. Some of us are occasionally tempted to point a finger at the failure of Americans to reconcile the incompatibilities of the black and white races within their borders. But we do not have to live with one of the most intractable human problems in the world any more than Americans have to assume responsibility for reconciling Arab and Jew or Moslem and Hindu. If these problems are soluble at all, it, is only by slow, patient, plodding work, over decade after decade. By this pedestrian method progress is being accomplished in the United States as it is in India. For all the handicaps and discriminations to which he is still subjected, the negro in the North has risen far above the status of his fellows in the South during the last generation. His economic and social position has steadily advanced, and as the result of the upheaval of the recent war things are moving, though very slowly, even in the South also. No final solution is yet in sight, and the authors of this book wisely avoid any pretence of forecasting one. The merit of their work for English readers lies in its detailed presentation of the poignant and complex social problems Created by the negro influx into a great industrial city and of the means by which the day-to-day conflict between the claims and aspirations of black and white is finding adjustinent. Anyone who reads it will probably shed any inclination he may have felt to dogmatise about the colour problem in the United
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