Essay: WHAT THE NEGRO HAS-AND HAS NOT-GAINED

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Negro employment in the professional and technical fields has soared 130% in the past decade; the number of Negro lawyers has increased 50% since 1950. In the South, well-educated Negroes are being hired for the first time as clerks, policemen, nurses in white hospitals and teachers in white schools. Boston's Negro newspaper has six pages of want ads for everybody from laboratory technicians to plasma physicists. In Milwaukee, Chicago and Providence, corporations have joined together to seek ways of finding more Negro workers and executive trainees; in Minneapolis, Omaha and San Francisco, corporate recruiters flock to interview thousands of Negroes at "job fairs." A dozen recently created personnel agencies specialize in Negroes, and almost every Negro graduate with a good college record can count on from three to twelve job offers.

Of course, discrimination is still far from eliminated. Some employment agencies, for example, use codes to alert prospective employers that the applicant is a Negro. The most unyielding barriers to the Negro's advancement are put up not by corporations but by the craft unions, which are so biased that it is easier for a Negro to become a physician or junior manager than an electrician or a plumber. A recent Labor Department survey showed that in Baltimore there were no Negro apprentices among the steam fitters, sheet-metal workers or plumbers; in Newark, none among the stonemasons, structural ironworkers or steam fitters; in Pittsburgh, none among the operating engineers, painters or lathers; in Washington, none among the glaziers, sheet-metal workers or asbestos workers.

Largely because of union bars, the incredible fact is that since 1957 the number of Negroes at work in the U.S. private economy has scarcely increased at all. The number of Negro jobholders has risen from 6,721,000 to 7,747,000 during that period, but the gains have been primarily in Government jobs. Negroes hold 23% of the city jobs in New York, 30% in Cleveland, 40% in Philadelphia. At the federal level, 13.2% of the nation's civil service employees are Negroes. Negroes sit in the U.S. Cabinet and on the Federal Reserve Board, act as postmasters of two major cities (Los Angeles and Chicago); six are U.S. ambassadors, 16 federal judges. In the armed forces, the number of Negro field-grade officers (major through colonel) has jumped since 1962 from 769 to 1,319.

EDUCATION. While still appreciably behind the whites, Negroes have made impressive gains in education, particularly at the college level. Outnumbered by white students 30 to 1, they have raised their numbers in colleges and universities to 225,000—far greater than the total enrollments of the universities of Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland put together. Almost all the Southern universities now have some Negroes. Admissions officers at such universities as California and Stanford give preference to Negroes; like many other schools, Harvard often chooses Negroes over whites with equivalent academic records. So many scholarships are being offered that almost any talented, energetic Negro youngster can get into college.