Ill

reported that many of these gains had by then been largely reversed by the
Depression. Less obviously, even employment in domestic service became
vulnerable in times of crisis. Reid reported that during one week in March 1930
the daily press carried 113 advertisements for Black domestic workers and 17 for
whites; during a week in March 1934 there were 122 want ads for white domestic
help and only 5 for Blacks. The racial-ethnic division of labor functioned in such a
way to insure the Black workers could not even find security in their
marginalization/"

The question comes to mind, to what degree was the racialized division of
labor in Baltimore a product border state Jim Crow. In 1923, Allison Muir,
personnel director of General Electric in Baltimore was quoted as saying,

The closer you get to the Mason and Dixon Line, the harder you find it to
mix whites and Negroes on the job. Both further North and further South it
is different. In Richmond, Virginia, for example, Negroes are doing skilled
work in the locomotive works, in Newport News in the shipyards, and in
Birmingham they are preferred to the "poor white trash." But in Baltimore
the white workers demand separation in everything.36

Muir's statement is partially disingenuous, for, as a representative of management,
he blames only the white workers. Nonetheless there is probably something to his
position. Charles S. Johnson, then director of a study of Blacks in industry
throughout the U.S. for the Urban League thought so; he quoted Muir. And it is
hard to believe that the overtly segregationist culture that was so evident in many
spheres of Baltimore life had no profound impact on the social division of labor.
On the other hand, a sharply racialized distribution of work was common North and
South. It is conceivable that there may have been a basic, national racial-ethnic
division of labor, and the specific contours of Baltimore's racial work distribution
may have had more to do with the types of industry present and relative size of its
Black and white workforces than with local Jim Crow mentalities. In cities to the
North there were proportionately far less Blacks and far more whites, so racial job
competition was less, and more whites were present in the most marginalized