Building Bricks without Straw

Robert C. Weaver's exemplary public service career was marked by an unrelenting struggle to eliminate the tradition of race prejudice that prevented blacks from attaining social and economic equality. This chapter focuses on how this struggle manifested itself during his early federal career in the 1930s and 1940s, when he devoted a considerable amount of time to getting blacks trained and employed. During this point, blacks were at the bottom of the economic ladder. In fact, two contemporary researchers offer significant insights about the condition of black labor. One was chief census statistician Alba Edwards and the other was Robert Weaver himself. In a 1936 article, “The Negro as a Factor in the Nation's Labor Force,” Edwards muses soberly over the plight of black workers as the economy in the 1930s was restructuring from a dependency on manual to machine labor. Edwards contended that the status of black labor did not bode well for the future. According to census data, most blacks had poorly paying jobs or were in occupations (chiefly farming) that were on the decline. If the Negro farm owners and tenants can be considered manual workers, then in 1930, more than 95 out of every 100 (95.4 percent) Negro workers were engaged in manual work; and if the 392,897 Negro sharecroppers can be considered unskilled, then, in 1930, 74.1 percent of Negro workers were in unskilled pursuits (e.g., domestic and personal service) ¹ . These trends led Edwards to predict future conditions that have come to symbolize the most troubling aspects of modern inner city-life. In his 1936 article about Negro labor, Edwards prophetically wondered if blacks would be displaced as mechanization progressed because they lacked the training to acquire machine-oriented unskilled work or to compete for advanced-level jobs. If jobs were not found as machines took over, he prophesied that there was “a real danger that in future years there will be large numbers of unemployed Negro workers and that these and their dependents will largely comprise [a permanent] unemployed class.” ²