Civil Rights: Not Racism, but Nepotism

It was fairly quiet on the Southern front, but in the North last week disturbing racial disorders boiled in the nation’s two biggest cities.

When three Negro families moved into “Canaryville,” an old Irish, all-white neighborhood on Chicago’s seamy South Side, whites hurled rocks and bottles at the newcomers’ windows. In ugly retaliation, a band of Negro youths smashed a window of a passing automobile, injuring a two-year-old white child. When the father got out to protest, the Negroes beat him with fists and baseball bats. More than 100 police cars rolled into the neighborhood to keep order, but by week’s end, despite 133 arrests, 15 people had been injured in racial disorders.

Human Chains. In New York, Negroes kept up their demonstrations at construction sites to protest the dearth of “brown faces” (Negroes and Puerto Ricans) in the building trades. Negro children crawled under halted trucks, grinned as cops dragged them out. A group of youths stormed a crane, climbed to its hook and clung there. Groups of pickets formed human chains, locked arm-in-arm to prevent trucks from entering or leaving the medical center site. When police moved in to break the chains, other demonstrators formed new chains right behind them. At one site, mounted police rammed their way into a mob with lowered truncheons.

It was difficult for many white New Yorkers who sympathize with the Negroes’ desire for equality to see any rational purpose in the construction-site demonstrations. They appeared to be as much outlets for general frustration and anger as thought-out efforts to get construction-industry jobs for Negroes. There is already a shortage of jobs for the unskilled in New York, in construction as in other fields. And the very real discrimination against Negroes in the skilled building trades is less a matter of racism than of nepotism. It is the unions that maintain the discrimination, not the contractors or their clients.

Exclusive Lodges. Members of building-trades unions get high wages for applying moderate skills to rather undemanding work. They have a good thing and they know it. Accordingly, they run their unions like exclusive lodges, discriminating not only against Negroes but also against whites who are not relatives or friends of members. In New York’s Plumbers Local No. 2, according to a recent Civil Rights Commission report, 80% or more of those admitted to membership in recent years have been sons or nephews of Local 2 members.

Since the only way to get to be a working plumber or plasterer in New York City is to join the appropriate union as an apprentice, few Negroes learn the building trades. Before there can be jobs for Negro plumbers, there must be Negro plumbers. When a building trades official asked Negro leaders to supply a list of skilled Negro building-trades workers who were looking for jobs, nobody, it appeared, had any such list. It was impossible for the moment to tell whether the construction-site demonstrations had really opened any doors, because there appeared to be nobody waiting to enter.