Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 16 March 1995 — Page 20

The Muncie Times, Thursday, 16 March 1995, Page 20

Muncie's African American History by Hurley Goodall and ^ J. Paul Mitchell . Black opportunities in Muncie, severly limited in the 30s

The Great Depression, which began with a sharp economic decline in 1929, hit Muncie’s black community especially hard. Muncie’s industries were heavily weighted toward durable goods. When this sector of the national economy surged in the 1920s, the local economy prospered. But the subsequent drop in demand for these goods brought on a severe slump, so that by the end of 1930 one out of every four Muncie factory workers had lost his job. This created employment pressures all down the line, at the end of which the last hired and first fired of that day faced uncertainty and unemployment. The employment picture for blacks was drawn quite clearly by Robert S. and Helen Lynd. Muncie’s selection by these two sociologists as the site for their Middletown study in the 1920s represents one of this city’s most significant historical developments. They returned in 1935 to study the community, after 10 years. In their second volume, Middletown in Transition, they observed that the cleft between white and black populations was the deepest line of division in Muncie. The employment situation was simple: “Active resentment of Negroes is largely confined to Middletown’s [Muncie’s] working class, who face some competition from Negroes for jobs, and who have their residential

neighborhoods abutting on or actually invaded by them. Business-class Mid-

‘We don’t have any Negroes at all. It’s degrading to a white man to have Ne-

dletown tolerates the Negro population complacently as a convenient instrument for getting certain types of dirty work done for low wages. According to the head of Middletown’s local branch of the State Employment Service Office, Negro labor in Middletown has fairly steady employment at the harder, meaner type of job in certain of Middletown’s factories, as hod carriers and similar unskilled labor in the building trades, on road gangs, and, in exceptional cases where a Negro’s character is above question, as janitors. “But the only thing a Negro man can do beyond that is a long step up from there to professional class serving his own race. There are no intermediate steps— a Negro cannot, for instance, become a machinist. An officer in a large automobile plant stated simply,

groes doing the same type of work.’” (Middletown in Transition, p. 463) Interviews with blacks who were working or seeking work in Muncie during the 1930s confirm this observation: it was very difficult to get a position as janitor and next to impossible to work in a factory, unless it was a foundry. Shoe shining, personal service for wealthy whites (and this was curtailed during hard times), housework, and odd jobs became prizes in the struggle to keep the wolf from the door. After the W.P.A. and other New Deal public works programs were launched, a number of black wage-earners were able to “lay on a shovel,” as the current phrase expressed it. They helped lay storm sewers throughout the Whitely area (incidentally, these sewers

later provided Whitely with some of the best surface drainage in the city), construct the Bearcat football stadium, and build the White River levee. The Lynds, in a word, assessed the position of Muncie’s blacks during times of economic distress as vulnerable. “But Middletown’s [Muncie’s] Negroes, for all their bettered leadership and organization, occupy a more exposed position today than before the depression. They are the most marginal population in Middletown. It may have been true in the past that, as a Middletown employer remarked, ‘Our Negroes work for the most part at jobs where there is little or no competition from whites. They apply for certain jobs and whites apply for the others:’ but in a world of too few jobs such tentative color lines will tend to vanish. And the Negro, always suspect to the whites in a

crisis, will tend to receive the full brunt of white resentment as the whites seek to wrest their jobs from them.” (p. 465) Earlier in Middletown in Transition, the Lynds had pointed to the disproportionate and growing number of arrests of black males as evidence of mounting economic pressures on those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. In noting the tension and potential for racial clashes during the Depression, the Lynds may have been aware that one of the most indelible incidents in the history of Muncie’s black community had taken place a few years earlier. In the neighboring city of Marion a mob of whites lynched two young black men who had been accused of raping a white women. After dragging them through the streets of Mar(See LOCAL on page 21)