Jim Crow era labor discrimination forced black workers into unbenefited sectors

Evidence

My father, James, was a plumber who worked, without benefits, for a private company, because black men couldn’t join the union that controlled the good public-sector jobs. My mother, Dottie, was a nurse and a seamstress who had left her job as a garment factory “floor girl” because she knew she could do better work than the white seamstresses who got all the opportunities. We lived in a three-family house at 1061 Morris Avenue, purchased with the help of a $6,000 loan from my father’s white boss, and rented the upper and middle apartments to black tenants who became more like family. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 9

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior note on ‘exhausted enslaved workers beaten by foremen’ and broader race-infrastructure reading; also grounds the ‘unequal starting conditions’ half of the key idea. — connects to: Racial segregation operates as rent-seeking that impoverishes black workers — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 401; Black women teachers endured severe pay discrimination and extra labor — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 222; Black elites’ fortunes were bound to the masses through shared Jim Crow constraints — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 285