The answers to these questions are hard, but yet one answer looms above
all,--justice lies with the lowest; the plight of the lowest man,--the
plight of the black man--deserves the first answer, and the plight of
the giants of industry, the last.

Little cared East St. Louis for all this bandying of human problems, so
long as its grocers and saloon-keepers flourished and its industries
steamed and screamed and smoked and its bankers grew rich. Stupidity,
license, and graft sat enthroned in the City Hall. The new black folk
were exploited as cheerfully as white Polacks and Italians; the rent of
shacks mounted merrily, the street car lines counted gleeful gains, and
the crimes of white men and black men flourished in the dark. The high
and skilled and smart climbed on the bent backs of the ignorant; harder
the mass of laborers strove to unionize their fellows and to bargain
with employers.

Nor were the new blacks fools. They had no love for nothings in labor;
they had no wish to make their fellows' wage envelopes smaller, but they
were determined to make their own larger. They, too, were willing to
join in the new union movement. But the unions did not want them. Just
as employers monopolized meat and steel, so they sought to monopolize
labor and beat a giant's bargain. In the higher trades they succeeded.
The best electrician in the city was refused admittance to the union and
driven from the town because he was black. No black builder, printer, or
machinist could join a union or work in East St. Louis, no matter what
his skill or character. But out of the stink of the stockyards and the
dust of the aluminum works and the sweat of the lumber yards the willing
blacks could not be kept.