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most dynamic sector of the economy, both the white U.S.-born workers and (even
more dramatically) white foreign-born workers were represented in proportions
substantially above their proportions in the working class as a whole.
Representation of Black workers in manufacturing was, however,
disproportionately low. It should be noted that even this low percentage of Blacks
in this sector was a historical high, and the result of three decades of African
American influx into manufacturing jobs: in 1900 only 4.2% of these jobs were held
by Blacks; by 1910 the proportion had more than doubled; by 1930 it had nearly
doubled again. Blacks had been pressed out of many areas of manufacturing during
the late nineteenth century in Baltimore, and their modest return to manufacturing
employment in the early twentieth-century was a limited economic victory over Jim
Crow.27

This victory was, however, severely limited. Focusing on the broad
distribution of ethnicity in the various strata of the manufacturing sector in 1930, it
is apparent that both foreign- and U.S.-born white workers were overrepresented
on the skilled and operative levels and underrepresented among the laborers.
Again, the opposite was true for African Americans; they made up a 57.6%
majority of the laborers, but only 10.2% of the operatives, and a tiny 6% of the
skilled. The pattern is familiar: Blacks were polarized toward menial unskilled jobs
supplementary to the production process, whites were overwhelmingly polarized
toward production work itself, both semi-skilled and skilled. Moreover, a similar
polarization functioned within the laboring stratum of manufacturing where African
Americans were often concentrated in the most dangerous, most unpleasant, least
desirable industries or departments of industries such as fertilizers (where Blacks
represented 88.5% of the laborers) and rolling mills (where Blacks were 66.7% of
the laborers).

However, within the laboring stratum of manufacturing a counter pattern is
also discernible, for Blacks were also highly concentrated in the laboring ranks of