Attaway, William | Drake de Kay (review date 24 August 1941)
Drake de Kay (review date 24 August 1941)
SOURCE: "The Color Line," in The New York Times Book Review, August 24, 1941, pp. 18, 20.
[In the following review of Blood on the Forge, de Kay praises Attaway for his skillful and unsentimental portrayal of the Great Migration.]
During and for several months after the close of the first World War a shortage of man power existed in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia steel industry. Attracted by wages of $4 a day, Southern farm Negroes moved North to enter the steel mills. From the point of view of tenant farmers living in a state of virtual peonage the low wages of the mill workers seemed riches, while there was an additional inducement to desert the land in the expectation of enjoying greater social freedom. The mass migration which drained large sections of the South of its farm labor, causing a new problem for agriculturists, also created a series of problems for Northern employers and...
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