cially the British West Indies. For later generations of slaves freedom was achieved by: the voluntary manumission by slave owners; self purchase; purchase by free relatives or philanthropic whites; escapes; legislative act as a reward; and general emancipation. Freedom, however, was qualified: "In most northern cities, however, the antebellum free negroes encountered the full range of racial segregation and discrimination in housing, employment, and public facilities." (Sowell 15).
Although slavery restricted the development of Negroes in educational terms, it facilitated the development of manual skills. The restrictions or outright prohibitions on educating Negroes made it difficult to tell how many children of free Negroes were attending school, but when they did, illiteracy was almost nil. Unlike some European minorities, the "free persons of color" were seldom recipients of public charity. After the arrival of the Irish in 1840, competition between them and Negroes was long and frequently bitter, although in Boston, New Orleans and New York, Negroes were preferred over Irish and received higher wages. The Irish had been given a special recognition: "In the explicitly discriminatory advertisements of the mid nineteenth century, the phrase 'any color or country except Irish' was not uncommon, and some advertisements were even more direct; 'A colored man preferred. No Irish need apply." (Sowell 21).
Once the "Jim Crow" system (the reduction or elimination of black voting) was installed, there was a mass migration in the late nineteenth century of unskilled and undereducated southern Negroes to northern black communities in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The loss of the vote was not the only incentive to migrate to the north: "Lynching, or at least the threat of it, was the most brutal method of chastising the blacks . . . Whites and Asians were also left dangling from trees, but overwhelmingly more blacks than others wer...