Terence V. Powderly and Disguised Discrimination.

The Black and Hispanic workers in the larger cities of the U.S. came there as a result of urbanization, a migratory movement that began after the first World War and accelerated in the Great Depression. This movement left behind in rural areas, particularly, in the South and West, a class of White poor who are now beginning to migrate to the cities and the North and West. These are the new immigrants of the next migration. Foreign workers migrating to the U.S. in the 1840s brought with them their own ideas regarding labor organization. Their experience included, among other things, the organization of industry along trade union lines-craft supremacy. Craft supremacy included the idea of job scarcity, the latter required some form of job control. Hence the mass of foreign workers and many indigenous workers, instead of extending sympathy to the down-trodden Blacks and Chinese, acted instead to eliminate them from the white social pyramid. Excluding Black and Chinese workers from competition by the device of alleged social inferiority offered the immigrant, potentially, more economic security.