CHAPTER IX

"To the black race, who, but recently, with the assistance of the white men of the northern states, broke their chains of bondage and ended chattel slavery, a prospect of further freedom, of Real Freedom, should be most appealing. "For it is a fact that the negro worker is no better off under the freedom he has gained than the slavery from which he has escaped. As chattel slaves we were the property of our masters, and as a piece of valuable property our masters were considerate of us and careful of our health and welfare. Today, as wage-workers, the boss may work us to death at the hardest and most hazardous labor, at the longest hours, at the lowest pay; we may quietly starve when out of work and the boss loses nothing by it and has no interest in us. To him the worker is but a machine for producing profits, and when you, as a slave who sells himself to the master on the installment plan, become old, or broken in health or strength or should you be killed while at work, the master merely gets another wage slave on the same terms. "We who have worked in the south know that conditions in lumber and turpentine camps, in the fields of cane, cotton and tobacco, in the mills and mines of Dixie, are such that the workers suffer a more miserable existence than ever prevailed among the chattel slaves before the great Civil War.... "The only problem, then, which the colored worker should consider, as a worker, is the problem of organizing with other workingmen in the labor organization that best expresses the interest of the whole working class against the slavery and oppression of the whole capitalist class. Such an organization is the I. W. W., the Industrial Workers of the World."