Naturally out of this the West Indian servant climbed out of slavery into citizenship, for few West Indian masters—­fewer Spanish or Dutch—­were callous enough to sell their own children into slavery.  Not so with English and Americans.  With a harshness and indecency seldom paralleled in the civilized world white masters on the mainland sold their mulatto children, half-brothers and half-sisters, and their own wives in all but name, into life-slavery by the hundreds and thousands.  They originated a special branch of slave-trading for this trade and the white aristocrats of Virginia and the Carolinas made more money by this business during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in any other way.

The clang of the door of opportunity thus knelled in the ears of the colored house servant whirled the whole face of Negro advancement as on some great pivot.  The movement was slow, but vast.  When emancipation came, before and after 1863, the house servant still held advantages.  He had whatever education the race possessed and his white father, no longer able to sell him, often helped him with land and protection.  Notwithstanding this the lure of house service for the Negro was gone.  The path of salvation for the emancipated host of black folk lay no longer through the kitchen door, with its wide hall and pillared veranda and flowered yard beyond.  It lay, as every Negro soon knew and knows, in escape from menial serfdom.

In 1860, 98 per cent of the Negroes were servants and serfs.  In 1880, 30 per cent were servants and 65 per cent were serfs.  The percentage of servants then rose slightly and fell again until 21 per cent were in service in 1910 and, doubtless, much less than 20 per cent today.  This is the measure of our rise, but the Negro will not approach freedom until this hateful badge of slavery and mediaevalism has been reduced to less than 10 per cent.

Not only are less than a fifth of our workers servants today, but the character of their service has been changed.  The million menial workers among us include 300,000 upper servants,—­skilled men and women of character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks, who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food.  But the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when the white world dinned in their ears. Negroes are servants; servants are Negroes. They shut the door of escape to factory and trade in their fellows’ faces and battened down the hatches, lest the 300,000 should be workers equal in pay and consideration with white men.