By the "black people" he meant the people from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes"-- "hordes and hordes of 'em"-- Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the same time the machines were speeded up.

It seems that many of these "black people" were single men or vigorous young married people with only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers and mothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.
"There wasn't a living for a decent family left," he said.
So they struck--and he told me in his dull monotone of the long bitterness of that strike, the empty cupboards, the approach of winter with no coal for the stoves and no warm clothing for the children.

He told me that many of the old workers began to leave the town (some bound for the larger cities, some for the Far West).
"But," said he with a sudden outburst of emotion, "I couldn't leave.

I had the woman and the children!" And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs.

"Begging like whipped dogs," he said bitterly.
Many of them found their places taken by the eager "black people," and many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places--punished for the fight they had made.
But he got along somehow, he said--"the woman was a good manager"-- until one day he had the misfortune to get his hand caught in the machinery.
It was a place which should have been protected with guards, but was not.