ABSTRACT
After the Civil War the best thing that could have happened to the black workers of the United States would have been a fair opportunity to contribute to satisfying the great demand for labour in the rapidly growing cities of the North and West. They could have participated alongside the millions of European immigrants in each upswing of the long cycle in urbanization; this would have materially raised the real income of the black migrants themselves and conferred benefits indirectly (e.g. through remittances) on those left in the South. The Negroes as an ethnic group could have earned their place like the Irish, the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Jews and the Italians in an expanding economy which permitted a continually changing equilibrium between a succession of very different ethnic groups. That this did not happen is part of the tragic history of racial intolerance.
