In his 1900 autobiography, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: Show "I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression on me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise." The vision of that schoolroom and the idea that learning was "paradise" would provide lifelong inspiration for Washington. He is, perhaps, best remembered as the head of the world famous Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, founded in 1881, and known today as Tuskegee University. His driving personality led a group of businessmen to ask if he would take the lead in creating the school. The Tuskegee Institute was the embodiment of Washington's over-arching belief that African Americans should eschew political agitation for civil rights in favor of industrial education and agricultural expertise. Washington believed that once it was apparent to whites that blacks would "contribute to the market place of the world," and be content with living "by the production of our hands," the barriers of racial inequality and social injustice would begin to erode. Those words were spoken on September 18, 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, Georgia, known as the Atlanta Exposition. Washington's speech stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the segregated system under which African Americans lived. He renounced agitation and protest tactics, and urged blacks to subordinate demands for political and equal rights, and concentrate instead on improving job skills and usefulness through manual labor. "Cast down your buckets where you are," he exhorted his fellow African Americans in the speech. Throughout his adult life, Washington played a dominant role in the African American community and worked tirelessly to improve the lives of blacks, many of whom were born in slavery. He gained access to presidents, top national leaders in politics, philanthropy and education. President William McKinley visited the Tuskegee Institute and lauded Washington, promoting him as a black leader who would not be perceived as too "radical" to whites. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to the White House. A picture was published of the occasion, which angered many whites who were offended by the idea of a Black American being entertained in the White House. Washington was never invited to the White House again, although Roosevelt continued to consult with him on racial issues. Washington also associated with some of the richest and most powerful businessmen of the era. His contacts included such diverse and well-known industrialists as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald, enlisting their support to help raise funds to establish and operate thousands of small community schools and institutions of higher education for the betterment of African Americans throughout the South. However, by the early 1900s, other African Americans, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, were becoming national figures and speaking out about the lack of progress African Americans were making in American society. Du Bois, initially an ally of Washington's, was particularly vocal about what he believed was Washington's acceptance of black's unchanging situation and began to refer to Washington's Atlanta speech as the "Atlanta Compromise" — a label that remains to this day. The criticism by Du Bois and others diminished Washington's stature for some in the black community. They denounced his surrender of civil rights and his stressing of training in crafts, some obsolete, to the neglect of a liberal arts education. Washington's public position of accommodation to segregation came in conflict with increasing calls from African Americans and liberal whites for more aggressive actions to end discrimination. Opposition centered in the Niagara Movement, founded in 1905, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an interracial organization established in 1909. Yet there was another side to Washington. Although outwardly conciliatory, he secretly financed and encouraged lawsuits to block attempts to disfranchise and segregate African Americans. Since his death in 1915, historians have discovered voluminous private correspondence that shows that Washington's apparent conservatism was only part of his strategy for uplifting his race. Even in death, as in life, Washington continues to engender great debates as to his true legacy. He was a founder of Tuskegee Institute, building it into one of the premiere universities for African Americans at a time when few alternatives were available, and he raised considerable funds for hundreds of other schools in the South for blacks. Yet, his 'Atlanta Compromise' speech stressed the need for blacks to accept the status quo and focus on manual labor as a way to economic development. In contrast, Du Bois believed that the "object of all true education is not to make men carpenters; it is to make carpenters men." Washington's position that "the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly," stands in stark contradiction to his covert support of legal challenges to discrimination. It is difficult to calculate the negative impact that flowed from Washington's unwillingness to speak out publically against lynching and other acts of violence against blacks at the time — even with his extraordinary access to presidents and other prominent whites in the nation. These two giants — Washington and Du Bois — underscore the fact that there was not a single linear path to achieving racial equality in the nation. The struggle required African Americans to both battle and accommodate the realities of segregation and discrimination to help future generations more fully realize the promise of America.
On the issue of immigration, contemporary Americans, and especially African Americans, need to be guided by two lessons from history. The first, from the New Testament, says that "without vision, the people perish." The second warns that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Unfortunately, many African American political leaders and intellectuals do not heed these lessons with regard to immigration. They either are ignorant of the insights of their forerunners or they fail to understand how similar today's conditions are to those during the previous wave of mass immigration. At the same time, it is clear from poll after poll that African Americans as a whole have much sounder views regarding today's record levels of immigration. One result of this intellectual and political dissonance is that African Americans are in danger of much greater future suffering because of the political choices and actions taken today on their behalf. As is clear from this compilation, "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are": Black Americans on Immigration, one of the facts of American history that is not widely discussed is the nation's long-standing preference for immigrant labor, when the alternative was to train and employ native-born African Americans. Booker T. Washington in his famous 1895 Atlanta exposition speech pleaded with industrialists not to look to European immigrants to man their new factories but rather to the black and white labor supply in the South. Blacks were always the residual labor pool and never able to enjoy the benefits of full employment, save for times of war when the preferred (white) immigrant supply was not available.1 African Americans were later denied (and often continue to be denied) access to skilled craft guilds and later labor unions. The mass immigration that started in the late 19th century greatly slowed the industrialization of the South and has made southern rural poverty most difficult to eradicate. We are beginning to reap the policy whirlwind of a similar mass immigration policy in the 1980s and 1990s. The result has been similar — a more difficult and depressed labor market for African Americans in the last part of the 20th century. America stands out among the world's nations by continuing a policy of mass immigration during a time of slow economic growth and industrial restructuring. African Americans are disproportionably hurt by this process because immigrants tend to locate in our big cities, there to compete with African Americans for housing, jobs, and education. Needless to say, as manufacturing and industrial jobs decline, the competition for the remaining blue-collar jobs becomes more intense, and when this happens African Americans lose for a variety of reasons — reasons ranging from racial stereotypes to employer preference for vulnerable workers fearing deportation. The following compilation of historical opinion should serve as a wake-up call for many of today's African American leaders and intellectuals, who take counterproductive stands on the issue of whether to encourage the expansion or contraction of immigration. African American leaders in the past knew that labor was not exempt from the law of supply and demand. Anything, including immigration, which increases the supply of labor in America works against the interests of African Americans. The consequences, such as depressed wages or the substitution of other workers, are clearly not in the interests of African Americans. It is sad that this basic fact, recognized by such dissimilar figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, is today so widely ignored. The Center for Immigration Studies should be commended for reminding contemporary African American intellectuals and political leaders how they have not been true to the insights of their predecessors — genuine leaders who never hesitated to put the interests of African Americans first. — Frank L. Morris, Former dean of graduate studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore Introduction
Thus did Frederick Douglass, just six years after the end of the Civil War, sum up the threat that mass immigration has posed to black Americans throughout much of our nation's history. Even before Emancipation, free blacks in the North had found their economic position challenged by immigrants. After the War, advocates for blacks initially feared that the defeated southerners would use immigrants to usurp blacks' role in the agrarian economy of the South. An Alabama man expressed the southern planters' thinking with regard to a scheme to import Chinese farmworkers:
The attempts by planters to shunt aside their former bondsmen in favor of foreigners ultimately proved unsuccessful; blacks' role in southern agriculture was preserved. But the widespread desire among white Americans to bypass blacks in favor of immigrants remained, and the way it unfolded proved to have more far-reaching consequences than any scheme to import alien farmworkers. The mass industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combined with the opening of vast lands in the West for settlement, offered an opportunity to draw toward the mainstream of the economy the mass of native-born unskilled labor that blacks represented. The vast labor needs of northern factories might have created an economic incentive to overcome the pervasive racism of the time, enabling blacks to get in on the ground floor of industrialization. The benefits of such a policy, to blacks specifically but also to the entire nation, would have been incalculable. But the opportunity was squandered. Between 1880 and 1924, about 26 million people came to the United States from overseas, mainly from southern and eastern Europe — a number equal to four times the total population of black Americans at the start of that Great Wave of immigration. These millions of immigrants slaked most of the thirst for labor of the North's rapidly expanding industries, permitting them to flower without having to attract rural black laborers. Blacks thus were shut out from the opportunity to flee Jim Crow and peonage in the South. Only with the labor shortages caused by the First World War, and the subsequent cutoff of most immigration in the 1920s, did blacks have to be recruited for high-wage jobs. Mass immigration, in other words, significantly altered the history of black Americans by delaying their entry into the modern, industrial economy. The two decades after World War II, with their rapid economic growth, presented another opportunity for black economic advancement. But it was during this period that immigration slowly began to rise after the lows of the 1920s and 1930s, and only a year after the struggle for black legal equality reached fruition with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the groundwork for a new wave of mass immigration was established with the Immigration Act of 1965. Since then, nearly 20 million legal immigrants have moved here, in addition to millions of illegal immigrants. This flow continues at the rate of about one million a year, in an unfortunate repetition of the period before World War I. Prominent black Americans today are silent regarding the pernicious effects of this ongoing immigration on their brethren. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was no such reticence. In speeches and letters, newspapers and books, black Americans of all political persuasions spoke out about the harm done to them by the federal government's policy of allowing the mass importation of cheap labor. This publication draws together a selection of that commentary, to remind us of the logic underlying black Americans' heritage of protest against mass immigration as a fundamental impediment to black economic progress — a heritage forgotten in recent years. Frederick DouglassFrederick Douglass escaped slavery in the 1830s and headed north. There he saw the beginnings of immigrant competition with blacks. Black men at the time dominated many blue-collar occupations in New York, while maids, cooks, laundresses and seamstresses were generally black women.4 They were secure in these types of employment and earned relatively good wages. But the influx of white foreigners changed the situation rapidly. Unskilled European workers moved into the occupations which had been dominated by blacks. Offering to work for any wages they could obtain, they reduced blacks' earnings dramatically and deprived many of employment. Douglass commented on this in an 1853 article:
In an 1879 article in the Baltimore Sun, he observed how the bargaining power of blacks, potentially greater in the South because of a lack of other labor, was undercut in the immigrant-rich cities of the North:
In an 1879 speech in Boston, Douglass commented on the motives of those encouraging Chinese immigration:
Neither the South or the North provided an escape for the ex-slaves against the rising tide of immigrant competition. Many decided to move west to Texas and California. In California, blacks and Chinese competed in the same businesses. In 1876, about 8,000 California Chinese worked as domestics or launderers, jobs blacks had once dominated. In an 1869 speech in Medina, N.Y., Douglass said:
In an 1871 article in The Washington New National Era, Douglass reflected on the meaning of cheap immigrant labor for blacks:
Nor did Douglass fail to note the political advantages enjoyed by immigrants. In an 1853 speech in New York, he said:
Outraged that the constitution of New York discouraged blacks from voting, Douglass condemned the state government in an 1855 speech in Troy, illustrating the tragic preference America has shown throughout its history for foreigners over native blacks:
Booker T. WashingtonBooker T. Washington was careful not to attack immigrants as human beings. In fact, he often held them up as role models for blacks, using the enterprising immigrant's ability to overcome oppression and poverty as a rhetorical device to inspire his fellow blacks. In a 1912 speech before the National Negro Business League in Chicago, for instance, Washington said:
But despite the rhetorical utility of promoting the example of immigrants as a spur to black achievement, he clearly saw that a national policy of mass immigration was harmful to blacks. In his famous address at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, Washington implored white industrialists to turn to their black fellow-countrymen to man their new factories, rather than import workers from overseas:
In an 1889 speech to the Women's New England Club, Washington criticized the widespread bias in favor of immigrants:
Such bias, in combination with mass immigration, would have devastating results for black Americans. Washington warned of this in an 1882 speech on industrial education for blacks before the Alabama State Teachers' Association:
Similarly, writing in 1902 in the Tuskegee Student about the lack of funds for education, Washington warned of the consequences of competition from mass immigration:
W.E.B. Du BoisW.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington represented the opposing poles of a debate about the best method of advancement for black Americans — a debate which continues today. But one thing Du Bois and Washington did agree on was the harm foreign labor could inflict on blacks. The two co-authored the 1907 book The Negro in the South, where they discussed how immigration was used against black workers:
But escape to the North would not be a solution either. To illustrate this, Du Bois wrote in his 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, that black barbers had been very abundant in that city, and had numerous white customers. As immigration increased, black barber shops did less business:
In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois wrote about the relations between immigrants and slaves before Emancipation:
In the same book, Du Bois pointed out that mass immigration hurt both black and white laborers, and he foreshadowed future events by noting the Republican Party platform of 1864, which advocated increased immigration in the interest of big business:
Finally, in a 1929 article in The Crisis, he reflected on the benefits to blacks from the reductions in immigration that had been enacted earlier in the decade:
Marcus GarveyJamaican-born Marcus Garvey led the "back to Africa" movement during the early part of this century. Despite the radical political differences that separated him from other prominent black Americans, he too recognized the threat to blacks of mass immigration. In a 1920 speech at Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., he warned of the rising tide of immigration and the despair it would create for blacks:
The Black PressNewspapers and magazines also reported on the loss of opportunities for blacks because of the large influx of immigrant labor. The following selection of editorials and articles provides some insight into black sentiment during the early years of this century. The Colored American Magazine of New York published the following piece in 1904 by John L. Waller, Jr., who minced few words about the "Evils of European Emigration":
Also in The Colored American Magazine, a 1905 piece entitled "Immigration Again," despite a certain chauvinism, was unequivocal about the threat posed by immigrant labor to blacks:
In another 1904 article, "Bread and Butter Argument," the magazine described the displacement of blacks by immigrants:
The wave of immigration early in this the century was temporarily halted by World War I, which made passage across the sea even more hazardous than usual. This cutoff in the flow of newcomers, and the return of some immigrants to their native lands, helped create opportunities for black Americans. The New York Age reported that blacks had the most to gain from legislation that would maintain this reduction in immigration. In 1917 it wrote: The action of Congress in enacting an Immigration bill is of particular interest to the colored people of this country. The return of thousands of foreigners to the home of their birth incident to the European war, materially helped to create new industrial opportunities for Negro labor. Immediately after the war the influx of immigrants to America is not likely to be large, for there will be plenty of work to be done abroad. Many inclined to come to this country will be discouraged by the literacy test.
Self-interest, the Age wrote in 1919, dictated that blacks should back a proposal before Congress to restrict immigration for four years. Passage of the bill, it predicted, would enable the race to establish such a solid position in industry that it would be difficult for anyone to replace them:27
The Chicago Defender, in a 1921 piece, expressed much the same opinion about immigration restriction:
The New York-based magazine The Messenger pointed out in 1925 the economic benefits to blacks of the recent cutoff in immigration:
Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League, wrote in the same vein in 1926:
Although immigration from Europe fell sharply, it continued from Mexico. The Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1927 about the threat to blacks from this continued flow, eerily foreshadowing events in our own day:
In 1928, the Courier wrote again about the danger to blacks from this employer-driven search for cheap labor: . . . . The Negro's losing competition with low standard foreign labor has been in the North and East, but now comes competition of a similar sort in his old stronghold: the South. In the past ten years well over a million and a half Mexicans have entered the Southwestern states seeking work. They were encouraged originally by the employers seeking cheap labor and high profits . . . There is only one valid ground on which agitation against further immigration of Mexican labor should be opposed by us: economic competition.33 The Courier nicely summed up the benefits for black Americans of ending mass immigration:
Endnotes1 See Sidney M. Wilhelm. Who Needs The Negro? New York: Anchor, 1971. 2 Foner, Philip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4. New York: International Publishers, 1954-1975, pp. 264-265. 3 Hellwig, David. "Black Reactions to Chinese Immigration and the Anti-Chinese Movement: 1850-1910." Amerasia 6:2 (1979), pp.25-44. 4 Man, Albon P. "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863." Journal of Negro History. vol. 36, pp. 375-405. 1951. 5 Foner, Philip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. vol. 2. New York: International Publishers, 1950, p. 224. Emphasis added. 6 Blassingame, John W. and John Mckivigan. The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, vol. 4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 501-502. 7 Blassingame and Mckivigan, vol.4, p. 248. 8 Blassingame and Mckivigan, vol.4, p. 232. Emphasis added. 9 Foner, pp. 264-265. Emphasis added. 10 Blassingame and Mckivigan, vol. 2, p. 424. 11 Blassingame and Mckivigan, vol. 3, pp. 92-93. Emphasis added. 12 "Address Before the National Negro Business League." The Broad Ax, Aug. 24, 1912. 13 Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903, p. 140. Emphasis added. 14 Harlan, Louis R. The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 3. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1974. 15 Harlan, Papers, vol. 2, pp. 193-194. 16 Harlan, Papers, vol. 6, p. 556. 17 Aptheker, Herbert. Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature. New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982, p. 70. Emphasis added. 18 Du Bois, W.E.B. Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Schoken Books, 1967, pp. 115-120. 19 Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1935, pp. 18-19 20 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 217. 21 Du Bois, W.E.B. "Immigration Quota," The Crisis, August 1929. Emphasis added. 22 Hill, Robert A. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983, p. 455. 23 The Colored American Magazine, vol. 7, pp. 595-596 (September 1904). 24 The Colored American Magazine, vol. 8, p. 240 (May 1905). 25 The Colored American Magazine, vol. 7, pp. 572-575 (September 1904). Emphasis added. 26 New York Age, February 8, 1917, p. 4. 27 Hellwig, David J. Black Leaders and the United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929. Journal of Negro History, Vol. 8, pp. 110-127. 1981. 28 New York Age, Feb. 8, 1919, p. 4. Emphasis added. 29 Chicago Defender, Dec. 17, 1921, p. 16. Emphasis added. 30 The Messenger, vol. 7, pp. 261, 275 (July 1925). Emphasis added. 31 Opportunity, vol. 4, pp. 366-367 (December 1926). Emphasis added. 32 Pittsburgh Courier, Section II, p. 8, August 13, 1927. Emphasis added. 33 Pittsburgh Courier, Section II, p. 8, March 24, 1928. Emphasis added. 34 Ibid. Emphasis added. SourcesBooks Aptheker, Herbert. Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature. New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982. Beck, Roy. The Case Against Immigration. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Blassingame, John W. and John McKivigan. The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series I, Vol. 2-4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Bodnar, John. Steelton: Immigration and Industrialization 1870-1940. Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Bonanza Books, 1962. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1931. Du Bois, W.E.B. Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Schocken Books, 1967. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1935. Du Bois, W.E.B. and Booker T. Washington. The Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1907. Foner, Phillip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. 4 of 5. New York: International Publishers, 1954-1975. Harlan, Louis R. The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volumes 1-6. Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Hill, Robert A. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983. Loewen, James. The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Meier, August and Elliot Rudwick. From Plantation to Ghetto. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Miller, Kelly. The Everlasting Stain. Washington: The Associated Publishers, 1924. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma. New York: Harper Brothers, 1944. Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971. Shankman, Arnold. Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Spero, Sterling and Abram Harris. The Black Worker. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Thomas, Brinley. Migration and Urban Development. London: Metheun and Co., Ltd., 1972. Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903. Washington, Booker T and Robert Pack. The Man Farthest Down. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1912. Wharton, Vernon L. The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. ArticlesFuchs, Lawrence. "The Reactions of Black Americans to Immigration," in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hellwig, David J. "Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929." Journal of Negro History 66, pp. 110-127, 1981. Hellwig, David J. "Black Reactions to Chinese Immigration and the Anti-Chinese Movement: 1850-1910." Amerasia, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1979), pp. 25-44, 1979. Hellwig, David J. "Building a Black Nation: The Role of Immigrants in the Thought and Rhetoric of Booker T. Washington." The Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1978, pp. 530-550. Man, Albon P. "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863." Journal of Negro History. 1951, pp. 375-405. Shankman, Arnold. "The Image of Mexico and the Mexican-American in the Black Press, 1890-1935." The Journal of Ethnic Studies, Summer 1975, pp. 43-56. Shankman, Arnold. "This Menacing Influx: Afro-Americans on Italian Immigration to the South, 1880-1915." The Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 1977-78, pp. 67-68. Skerry, Peter. "The Black Alienation." The New Republic, January 30, 1995, pp. 19-20. PeriodicalsThe Colored American Magazine The Crisis Opportunity The Messenger NewspapersThe Broad Ax Chicago Defender New York Age Pittsburgh Courier |