This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-07-24T14:03:17+00:00 Labor Conflict and Race 2 How can labor conflicts in 1919 help us understand the riots? image_header 2019-07-24T21:01:40+00:00 08/02/1919
  When World War I halted immigration from Europe, employers sought a new source of labor. Consequently, factories opened their doors to African American men. African American women were also being increasingly hired for domestic work. While many African Americans were certainly receiving higher wages and more opportunities for employment in the North, shop floors were still tense as various ethnoracial groups competed for employment and labor rights. Many historians and journalists have now noted how labor conflicts throughout the early 20th century can help explain the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.  
  
  Typically, tensions were created between white and Black workers over union membership. At the time of the 1919 Riot, a majority of African Americans were not union members, or were nowhere close to the proportion of whites who were union members. The reason was that unskilled laborers were not included in many of the unions that existed at that time and African Americans were often only able to obtain unskilled positions because of discrimination. As a result, many of the unions were homogeneously white. Already placed under precarious conditions and limited employment opportunities in Chicago, Black laborers throughout the early 20th century were sometimes forced to serve as strikebreakers. Consequently, white union workers began to increasingly conflate “scabs” with African Americans throughout the early 20th century. These conflations would have violent ends. For example, in 1904 a Black man and his ten-year-old child were tragically mauled by a mob of 500 white laborers because the mob believed the man and his son were strikebreakers. 
  Following World War I, the forces of demobilization touched all levels of the economy—especially Black Chicagoans, whose employment security was in large part attributable to the government’s demands for war products. In comparison to white workers, Black women and men were typically the first workers to be let go. Nonetheless, white workers also felt the constraints of the post-wartime economic shift. By July 1919, upwards of 250,000 workers in Chicago were on strike or threatening to strike. One of the most infamous strikes occurred in the stockyards, located in Chicago’s South West side. Ninety percent of the whites in the stockyards were unionized, while three-fourths of the Black workers, or 9,000 people, were not unionized due to the racial antipathy that barred them from union membership. Having been barred, segregated, and ridiculed, Chicago’s Black workers in the stockyards could not identify with the labor movement. As white union members went on strike, African Americans were hired as strikebreakers, amplifying the tensions that already existed in the South Side of Chicago. These tensions would eventually emerge through the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.