A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

the variety of employment opportunities far outstripped those available in the countryside. But the black urban social structure was, compared with that of whites, truncated and heavily weighted toward the bottom. Nearly all urban blacks lived by manual labor, the vast majority as servants, porters, and unskilled day laborers. They received subsistence wages, faced much higher unemployment rates than whites, and enjoyed virtually no opportunities for the accumulation of property or upward mobility.

Wow. You could find stark parallels with modern, urban Black/ Latino circumstances.