American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black men in America were prevented by law, policy, and custom from undertaking all but the most menial tasks. In an irony pointed out by the historian Jacqueline Jones, enslaved black men worked in a wide variety of skilled jobs—from blacksmithing to carpentry—because doing so benefited their white masters. But after Emancipation, their job prospects narrowed. Skilled work and high wages were reserved for white men. Black men worked at Link-Belt from the early 1900s but were relegated to the dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs. Well into the twentieth century, black people were largely barred from operating machines, from tractors to typewriters to cash registers. The jobs black men could find were as ditch diggers, shoe shiners, waiters, chauffeurs. In the early twentieth century, the largest employer of black men was the Pullman Company, which hired former slaves to cater to the needs of wealthy passengers on its sleeping car trains.