World War I labor scarcity drove northern industry to recruit Black workers

Evidence

For Blacks, in sociological and political terms, one of the most important events in American history at the time of the First World War was the migration to the sites of urban and particularly northern industry. With the outbreak of the war, the European immigration of laborers had been severely restricted by both the exigencies of war and Congressionally imposed controls. In addition, war-time conscription had removed thousands of white workers from their jobs while at the same time war was opening markets to U.S. goods and increasing the demand for labor. The war, then, produced a labor scarcity in American industry. In such a labor market, workers had an advantage in their demands for wage increases; and as the term of the war lengthened, job action as a labor tactic became more diffused among workers, including the semi-skilled. Northeastern industrialists and their counterparts in the Midwest attempted to resolve the problem of increasing labor costs and labor militancy by recruiting southern and Caribbean Blacks. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 997

Categorization

• XREF: The Great Migration’s structural engine parallels the economic causes that produced black urban political radicalism later in this book. — connects to: The Great Migration northward began before World War I — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 787