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and theater concerts and dances and entertaining our friends. All around us, Jim Crow stands as a prison, keeping our people from the enjoyment of the wealth they helped to create and have a right to share. Have We the Ability for Skilled Jobs? Every young Negro wants the right to be respected for what he is-to be accepted by his fellow-workers and the world on the basis of his ability and his character. But what chance do we have? Walk into the office of a big public utility corporation and look around. Thousands of Negroes ride on the street cars and subways of this corporation every day. Do you see any Negroes in executive positions? Are any of the corporation's lawyers Negroes? The traffic managers? The foremen? The clerks who sit in the office or the bookkeepers who add up columns of figures? The conductors or the motormen on the cars or the guards in the subways? No, we won't find any Negroes in any of these positions. Why not? You'll find that the only Negroes that this corporation employs are working as porters, sweeping out the cars, or on construction gangs repairing the tracks- and getting the lowest wages paid by this corporation to any of its workers. Scottsboro Symbolizes Jobless Youth Why is it that the Negro people are relegated to the position of being bootblacks and porters for companies who made millions of dollars out of the Negroes? Because there are no Negroes with the brains or ambition to become 24 lawyers or clerks or motormen or bookkeepers? Every young Negro knows that this is not the reason. The reason is that we are being held as a subject nation-an oppressed people- oppressed by the same big corporations that oppress and exploit their white workers too. We have as much self-respect and dignity as any other people. It burns in our heart when we are denied the most elementary of human rights. That is why we see in the figures of the Scottsboro boys-denied employment, framed for rape as they were riding a freight-car through the South in search of any kind of work-an example of the whole oppression of our people. Why Girls Go Wrong We are particularly indignant at the way our girls are treated. In the big cities, thousands of them work in the sweat-boxes of the steam laundries. Thousands of them can find no other work except being house-servants in the homes of the rich. Any one of us would seethe with humiliation to watch these girls lined up, to watch the "madame" walk up and down, looking them over just as if they were slaves on the auction-block to select the one who will have the "privilege" of working for fifty cents a day. Under these circumstances, with Negro families needing the money that their children bring in, with opportunities fewer for the Negro girls, with wages that are an insult rather than a means of living, it is no wonder that hundreds of our girls are forced into a life of shame. And it is 25
