CHAPTER XVIII RACE SEGREGATION AND DISCRIMINATION Race segregation in cities, 742.- Pressure of race prejudice in a Northern city, 752. Problems of citizenship: the views of a Northern student of the race problem, 755. 70. RACE SEGREGATION IN CITIES1 Migration to the city is being followed by segregation into districts and neighborhoods within the city. In Northern cities years ago negro residents, for the most part, lived where their purses allowed. With the influx of thousands of immigrants from the South and the West Indies, both native negro and newcomer have been lumped together into distinct neighborhoods. In Southern cities domestic servants usually still live upon the premises of their employers or near by. But the growing negro business and professional classes and those engaged in other than domestic and personal service find separate sections in which to dwell. Thus the negro ghetto is growing up. New York has its "San Juan Hill" in the West Sixties, and its Harlem district of over 35,000 within about eighteen city blocks; Philadelphia has its Seventh Ward; Chicago has its State Street; Washington its North West neighborhood, and Baltimore its Druid Hill Avenue. Louisville has its Chester Street and its "Smoketown"; Atlanta its West End and Auburn Avenue. These are examples taken at random which are typical of cities, large and small, North and South. This segregation within the city is caused by strong forces at work both within and without the body of the negroes themselves. Naturally, negroes desire to be together. The consciousness of kind in racial, family, and friendly ties binds them closer to one 1 By G. E. Haynes. Adapted from "Conditions among Negroes in the Cities," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. XLIX, September, 1913, pp. 109-119. another than to their white fellow-citizens. But as negroes develop in intelligence, in their standard of living and economic power, they desire better houses, better public facilities, and other conveniences not usually obtainable in the sections allotted to their less fortunate black brothers. To obtain these advantages they seek other neighborhoods, just as the European immigrants who are crowded into segregated sections of our cities seek better surroundings when they are economically able to secure them. But a prejudiced opposition from his prospective white neighbors confronts the negro, which does not meet the immigrant who has shuffled off the coil of his Continental condition. Intelligence and culture do not often discount color of skin. Professions of democratic justice in the North, and deeds of individual kindness in the South, have not yet secured to negroes the unmolested residence in blocks with white fellow-citizens. In Northern cities where larger liberty in some avenues obtains, the home life, the church life, and much of the business and community life of negroes are carried on separately and apart from the common life of the whole people. In Southern communities, with separate street-car laws, separate places of amusement and recreation, separate hospitals and separate cemeteries, there is sharp cleavage between whites and negroes, living and dead. With separation in neighborhoods, in work, in churches, in homes, and in almost every phase of their life, there is growing up in the cities of America a distinct negro world, isolated from many of the impulses of the common life and little known and understood by the white world about it. In the midst of this migration and segregation the negro is trying to make a threefold adjustment, each phase of which requires heroic struggle. First, there is the adjustment that all rural populations have to make in learning to live in town. Adjustment to conditions of housing, employment, amusement, etc., is necessary for all who make the change from country to city. The negro must make a second adjustment from the status of a chattel to that of free contract, from servitude to citizenship. He has to realize in his own consciousness the self-confidence of a free man. Finally, the negro must adjust himself to the white population in the cities, and it is no exaggeration of the facts to say that generally to-day the attitude of this white population is either indifferent or prejudiced or both. Now, the outcome of segregation in such a serious situation is first of all to create an attitude of suspicion and hostility between • the best elements of the two races. Too much of the negro's knowledge of the white world comes through demagogues, commercial sharks, yellow journalism, and those "citizens" who compose the mobs, while too much of the white man's knowledge of the negro people is derived from similar sources, from domestic servants, and from superficial observation of the loafers about the streets. The best elements of both races, thus entirely removed from friendly contact, except for the chance meeting of individuals in the market place, know hardly anything of their common life and tend to become more suspicious and hostile toward each other than toward strangers from a far country. " The white community is thus frequently led to unjust judg ments of negroes and negro neighborhoods, as seen in the soubriquets of "little Africa," "black bottom," Niggertown," "Smoketown," "Buzzard's Alley," "Chinch-row," and as indicated by the fact that the individuals and families who live in these neighborhoods are all lumped by popular opinion into one class. Only here and there does a white person come to know that "there are negroes and negroes just as there are white folks and white folks." The most serious side of this attitude and opinion is, that the negro is handicapped by them in securing the very things that would help him in working out his own salvation. In the matter of the housing conditions under which he must live, reliable investigations have shown that in several cities the "red-light" districts of white people are either in the midst of or border closely upon negro neighborhoods. Also respectable negroes often find it impossible to free themselves from disrepu table and vicious neighbors of their own race, because the localities in which both may live are limited. And on top of this, negroes often pay higher rentals for accommodations similar to those of white tenants, and, frequently, improved houses are secured only when white people who occupied them have moved on to something better. In Southern cities many of the abler classes of negroes have escaped the environment of the vicious element by creating decent neighborhoods through home ownership, and by eternal vigilance excluding saloons, gambling places or other degrading agencies. For the poorer and less thrifty element, in a number of towns and cities, loose building regulations allow greedy landlords to profit by "gun-barrel" shanties and cottages, by "arks," of which the typical pigeon-house would be a construction model, and by small houses crowded upon the same lot, often facing front street, side street, and the alley, with lack of sewerage and with other sanitary neglect, which an inspector of one Southern city described as "a crying disgrace to any civilized people." Yet, in the face of these handicaps, thousands of homes that would do credit to any people on earth are springing up in these cities. In the absence or with the indifference of sanitary authorities, intelligent negroes are not only struggling to free themselves from disease-breeding surroundings, but they are teaching the unintelligent throng. In spite of spontaneous schemes of real-estate owners and agents to keep them out of desirable neighborhoods, in spite of the deliberate designs of city segregation ordinances such as have been passed in several cities and attempted in others, in spite of intimidation, the abler negroes in some cities are buying homes and creating decent neighborhoods in which to live. However, the larger proportion are rent payers and not owners, hence they need intelligent leadership and influential support in their efforts for improved housing and neighborhood conditions. Three facts should be placed in the foreground in looking at the economic conditions of the segregated negro in the city. First, the masses of those who have migrated to town are unprepared to meet the exacting requirements of organized industry and the keen competition of more efficient laborers. Second, organized facilities for training these inefficient, groping seekers for something better are next to nothing in practically all the cities to which they are flocking. They therefore drift hit or miss into any occupations which are held out to their unskilled hands and untutored brains. Natural aptitude enables many to "pick up" some skill, and these succeed in gaining a stable place. But the thousands work from day to day with that weak tenure and frequent change of place from which all unskilled, unorganized laborers suffer under modern industry and trade. The third fact of prime importance is the prejudice of the white industrial world, which the negro must enter to earn his food, shelter, and raiment. This prejudice, when displayed by employers, is partly due to the inefficiency indicated above and the failure to discriminate between the efficient individual and this untrained throng. When exhibited by fellow wage-earners, it is partly due to fear of probable successful competitors and to the belief that the negro has "his place" fixed by a previous condition of servitude. But in the cases of many employers and employees, as shown in numbers of instances carefully investigated, the opposition to the negro ir industrial pursuits is due to a whimsical dislike of any workman who is not white and especially of one who is black! In Southern cities negro labor is the main dependence and manual labor is slow to lose the badge of servitude. But for selected occupations in Southern cities between 1890 and 1900 the rate of increase in domestic and personal service occupations among negroes was greater than that in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, and than that in trade and transportation, if draymen, hackmen, and teamsters are omitted from the last classification. The occupations of barbering, whitewashing, laundering, etc. are being absorbed by white men. The white firemen of the Georgia Railroad and Queen and Crescent Railway struck because these companies insisted upon giving negro firemen employment on desirable trains. These are indications of a possible condition when the desire of white men for places held by negroes becomes a matter of keen competition. When it comes to the question of business experience and opportunity, the sea is still thicker with reefs and shoals. A negro who wants training and experience in some line of business that he may begin some enterprise of his own, finds, except in very rare cases, the avenues to positions in white establishments which would give him this experience closed. The deadline of his desire |