With this congestion, however, have come serious difficulties.  Crowded conditions give rise to vice, crime and disease.  The prevalence of vice has not been the rule but tendencies, which better conditions in the South restrained from developing, have under these undesirable conditions been given an opportunity to grow.  There is, therefore, a tendency toward the crowding of dives, assembling on the corners of streets and the commission of petty offences which crowd them into the police courts.  One finds also sometimes a congestion in houses of dissipation and the carrying of concealed weapons.  Law abiding on the whole, however, they have not experienced a wave of crime.  The chief offences are those resulting from the saloons and denizens of vice, which are furnished by the community itself.

Disease has been one of their worst enemies, but reports on their health have been exaggerated.  On account of this sudden change of the Negroes from one climate to another and the hardships of more unrelenting toil, many of them have been unable to resist pneumonia, bronchitis and tuberculosis.  Churches, rescue missions and the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes have offered relief in some of these cases.  The last-named organization is serving in large cities as a sort of clearing house for such activities and as means of interpreting one race to the other.  It has now eighteen branches in cities to which this migration has been directed.  Through a local worker these migrants are approached, properly placed and supervised until they can adjust themselves to the community without apparent embarrassment to either race.  The League has been able to handle the migrants arriving by extending the work so as to know their movements beforehand.

The occupations in which these people engage will throw further light on their situation.  About ninety per cent of them do unskilled labor.  Only ten per cent of them do semi-skilled or skilled labor.  They serve as common laborers, puddlers, mold-setters, painters, carpenters, bricklayers, cement workers and machinists.  What the Negroes need then is that sort of freedom which carries with it industrial opportunity and social justice.  This they cannot attain until they be permitted to enter the higher pursuits of labor.  Two reasons are given for failure to enter these:  first, that Negro labor is unstable and inefficient; and second, that white men will protest.  Organized labor, however, has done nothing to help the blacks.  Yet it is a fact that accustomed to the easy-going toil of the plantation, the blacks have not shown the same efficiency as that of the whites.  Some employers report, however, that they are glad to have them because they are more individualistic and do not like to group.  But it is not true that colored labor cannot be organized.  The blacks have merely been neglected by organized labor.  Wherever they have had the opportunity to do so, they have organized and stood for their rights like men.  The trouble is that the trades unions are generally antagonistic to Negroes although they are now accepting the blacks in self-defense.  The policy of excluding Negroes from these bodies is made effective by an evasive procedure, despite the fact that the constitutions of many of them specifically provide that there shall be no discrimination on account of race or color.