Chapter IX · PUBLIC OPINION IN RACE RELATIONS

The Negro in the United States: "A person of African blood (much or little) about whom men of English descent tell only half the truth, and because of whom they do not act with frankness and sanity either toward the Negro or to one another—in a word, about whom they easily lose their common sense, their usual good judgment, and even their powers of accurate observation. The Negro-in-America, therefore, is a form of insanity that overtakes white men."—The Southerner by Walter Hines Page.

The Stoic proverb, that "men are tormented by the opinions they have of things rather than by the things themselves,"[79] applies as aptly to the relations between the white and Negro populations as to other of our problems. Because the "race problem" has been so vaguely stated, so variously explained, and so little understood, discussions of it and the conduct of whites and Negroes toward each other usually express feeling rather than intelligence.

The public is guided by patterns of behavior and traditions generally accepted, whether sound or unsound. False notions, if believed, may control conduct as effectively as true ones. And pre-established notions lose their subtle influence when it appears that their basis is in error.

White persons are generally uninformed on matters affecting Negroes and race relations. They are forced to rely on partial and frequently inaccurate information and upon traditional sentiments. This same ignorance applies to Negroes, though not to the same degree; for they know white people in their intimate personal and home relations and in connection with their work in factories and stores. They read their books and papers and often hear their discussions. Negroes are perhaps more race conscious than whites because every day they must face situations which remind them of their race. They are sensitive to moods and antagonisms expressed in words and shown in manners. Their impressions from the white group are subject to distortion as are those received by the whites from them. Negroes manifest characteristics which, though the natural result of their circumstances and experiences, are yet misunderstood and often resented by the white group. For Negroes live and think in a state of isolation which is almost complete; and no white group understands it, or can fully understand it.

The riot of 1919 is an example of the effects of this isolation and misunderstanding. The accumulated resentments, unchallenged mutual beliefs and resultant friction, culminated in a surprising calamity and wholesale bloodshed.

This chapter, therefore, has a thesis and a purpose. If these beliefs, prejudices and faulty deductions can be made accessible for examination and analysis, many of them will be corrected. If a self-critical attitude toward these prejudices can be stimulated by typical examples, a considerable step will have been taken toward understanding and harmony.

The study of public opinion in race relations attempted by the Commission does not presume to set down definite laws of its working, or to tell all about how it works. The aim is merely to make apparent and objective its place and importance in race relations, to indicate some of the ways in which it has developed; how it expresses itself, how it affects both the white and Negro groups; how, in its present state, it is strengthened, weakened, polluted, or purified by deliberate agencies or even by its own action, and finally how it may be used to reduce, if not to prevent, racial unfriendliness and misunderstanding.

The following plan is employed in presenting this branch of the subject:

1. Beliefs regarding Negroes, which greatly influence the conduct of white persons toward them, are described as they apply in the local environment, and their origin and background are traced suggestively to their responsible literature and circumstances.

2. Types of sentiment which are variants of these basic beliefs are presented with a view to making them intelligible, and to classifying them according to resolvable factors of misunderstanding.

3. Since personal attitudes and beliefs are molded by traditions and heritages apart from the exclusive influence of literature, material collected through intimate inquiry is presented objectively to describe the processes by which they appear to be created and to grow. Replies to a searching questionnaire on attitudes and opinions express the result of painstaking self-analysis.

4. Negro opinion on these same issues is described and illustrated with a view to making it intelligible. Their views are listed and their interpretations of current white sentiment are explained as far as possible.

5. From the subjective aspect the study then turns to the instruments by which these opinions are formed and perpetuated and the individual attitudes created. The following are deemed the chief agencies: (a) the press, (b) rumors, (c) myths, (d) propaganda. Conscious and unconscious abuse of these instruments of opinion-making is pointed out and explained.

6. Finally, means are suggested by which public opinion may, where it is faulty, correct itself, and employ its own instruments in the creation of wholesome sentiments among Negroes with respect to whites, and among whites with respect to Negroes.

A. OPINIONS OF WHITES AND NEGROES

I. BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Literature concerning Negroes has been written chiefly by southern students facing the problem in its most intense form and usually meeting the most backward of Negroes. Negro habits have been objectively explained and standards of judgment upon the entire group have usually been deduced therefrom. This constitutes the bulk of serious literature on the subject of the Negro; it is generally used in research into the problem.

In the North as in the South the assumptions regarding the Negro have their basis in similar sources. The beliefs, in general, are the same, though held by individuals in varying degrees. Though northerners do not believe so firmly and with such emotional intensity all that southerners believe about Negroes, yet they share these beliefs in proportion as they have been influenced or informed by southerners. It may happen, for example, that in a small northern town with but a handful of Negroes there is no discernible distinction in the treatment accorded them. The growth of the colony, however, can bring to the surface at first almost undiscernible shades of the usual beliefs, and finally the identical beliefs entertained by other communities.

There is, for example, no section of the country in which it is not generally believed by whites that Negroes are instinctively criminal in inclination. Some believe that they are criminal by nature and explain it as a result of heredity; some feel that it is a combination of heredity and environment; while others may feel that this inclination is due to environment alone. How, indeed, may the belief be avoided? Crime figures on Negroes are consistently unfavorable to any other conclusion. Students have gone so far as to accept without question these figures and proceed to explain that criminal tendency scientifically. This is also true as to low mentality, sexual immorality, and a long list of other supposed racial defects.

Below are presented some of the more important beliefs among whites about Negroes that have become crystallized by years of unchallenged assumption. They divide themselves into two general classes: (1) Primary beliefs, or fundamental and firmly established convictions which have, all around, the deepest effect on the attitude of whites toward Negroes. These are usually presented as revealed by statistics, authorities, and research. (2) Secondary beliefs, or the lighter modifications and variants of the supposed attributes of Negroes included in the more important assumptions.

1. PRIMARY BELIEFS

Mentality.—The chief of these is that the mind of the Negro is distinctly and distinctively inferior to that of the white race, and so are all resulting functionings of his mind.

This view is held by some to be due to a difference in species, by others to more recent emergence from primitive life, and by others to be due to backwardness in ascending the scale of civilization. For this reason it is variously assumed as a corollary that the mind of the Negro cannot be improved above a given level or beyond a given age; that his education should be adapted to his capacities, that is, he should mainly be taught to use his hands. Thus a teacher in one of the elementary schools of Chicago finds that "colored children are restive and incapable of abstract thought; they must be constantly fed with novel interests and given things to do with their hands." Accordingly they are given handicraft instead of arithmetic, and singing instead of grammar.

In seeking the opinion of white trades unionists on the admission of Negroes to unions in Chicago, the Commission encountered in perhaps the harshest form the conviction that Negroes were inherently unable to perform tasks that white men did as a matter of course. A member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers felt that no Negro had, or could ever acquire, intelligence enough to run an engine. Employers frequently expressed the belief that Negroes are incapable of performing tasks which require sustained mental application. This view of their mental weakness appeared in the following statement made before the Commission by a school principal concerning her experience with Negro children:

So far as books are concerned there are set types of learning which they take with great difficulty. Last Friday a colored boy came to me and said, "I want to go back to the first grade." We have gotten him in the third grade. He came to me and cried—a great big boy—because he said the work was much too hard for him, and he didn't want to study. His teacher was cross with him and insisted he must get to work. It is an exception to have a boy so frank. But I don't think the instance is far from the truth. I have never had a white child complain that he was graded too high and wanted to be put down. Sometimes when they come in, they say to me: "I went to school in the South, and I am in high fifth grade." "How long were you in school in the South?" "Three sessions." Two months, and they are in high fifth grade! I put them into the first or second grade. Sometimes I can't fit them into the smaller grades, and sometimes they resent it, but when they get into the actual school work and find they can't do it, they can't complain. I should say therefore that there is a certain amount of mental backwardness found in colored children not found in whites.

A teacher in a Chicago public school said: "I believe like Dr. Bruner [director of Special School, Board of Education] that when a Negro boy grows a mustache his brain stops working."

A teacher in Moseley School said: "The great physical development of the colored person takes away from the mental, while with the whites the reverse is true. There is proof for this in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes."

Morality.—Another of these primary beliefs is that Negroes are not yet capable of exercising the social restraints which are common to the more civilized white persons. Sometimes it is said that they are unmoral rather than immoral. This view, while charitably explaining supposed innate defects of character, places them outside the circle of normal members of society. Thus the assistant principal of a Chicago high school attended by Negroes said:

When it comes to morality, I say colored children are unmoral. They have no more moral sense than a very young white child. Along sex lines they don't know that this is wrong and that is wrong—that wrong sense isn't a part of them. Of course we say they are immoral and a white child doing the same thing under the same circumstances would be. The colored and white children here don't get mixed up in immorality; they are too well segregated. Not that we segregate them: the whites keep away from the colored.

This belief appears in statements that there is no family life among Negroes and but little respect, even in Chicago, for the ordinary decencies; when serious students of society speak of the promiscuity of colored women and men in sexual as well as social relations; and when social institutions assume the impossibility of locating the real father of children in a Negro family. Much public emphasis is given to the subject of venereal disease among Negroes, and certain deductions regarding this incidence of disease have resulted from comparative statistics.

Criminality.—The assumption back of most discussions of Negro crime is that there is a constitutional character weakness in Negroes and a consequent predisposition to sexual crimes, petty stealing, and crimes of violence. Sexual crimes are alleged and frequently urged in justification of lynching. Popular judgment takes stealing lightly, because Negroes evidence a marked immaturity and childishness in it. It is supposed that they appropriate little things and do not commit larger thefts. Crimes of violence are thought to be characteristic of Negroes because crimes involving deliberation and planning require more brains than Negroes possess.

The president of a branch of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs thus explained the decision of that organization not to discuss the Negro question in its meetings:

Most of the presidents expressed themselves as against discussion of the Negro question because as women's names come out as being against the Negroes these women and others of the club would have to live in fear of Negro men. A woman must be careful not to put herself in a position of causing them to have a grudge against her, as you know a white woman has to fear a colored man.

A resident in an exclusively white residential district said:

Mother, sister, and I lived here alone and we had a car which we kept in a garage in the back yard. Whenever we came in at night we never used the back door, but always went around front. Several times in walking up the back steps to the porch we had been frightened by colored men sitting on the steps or lying on the porch, and so we couldn't use that way into the house.

Another white woman, in the course of a discussion of housing indicated this fear of Negro men:

When we came here this was a nice neighborhood. After some years a colored family moved in, then two or three more, and more and more, until you see what we have here now. I tell you the white people right on this street have to be afraid for their lives.

Another, living on Langley Avenue, near Forty-third Street, said:

I don't hold any conversations with Negroes. It's better to be on the safe side when you've got grown-up daughters. I worry a good deal about my two daughters as they go and come from work, but they've never had anything happen.

The principal of a Chicago public school was questioned by a visitor concerning the attitude of white parents toward the association of their children with Negro pupils in that school. "The white parents are cautious about stirring up trouble," he said, "for they know the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill."

Petty thefts by Negroes, especially of food, are regarded as annoying evils most easily dealt with by a sort of half-serious firmness. A white resident of a district largely inhabited by Negroes said:

A white neighbor keeps chickens in her back yard. She gets the burglar alarm from the hen house sometimes twice in a week, and the running thief is always colored.... The colored buy whatever they want; they'll spend their last cent and not worry about the next day. If they want a chicken for dinner and it's $1 a pound, they buy it or steal it.

Physical unattractiveness.—Objections to contact are often attributed to physical laws which, it is said, make the sight or other sensory impression of the Negro unbearably repulsive. This attitude is found in protests against indiscriminate seating arrangements in street cars. The word "black" has long been associated with evil and ugliness, and it is not always a simple task to disassociate the idea from impressions given by a black man. Not merely is the color regarded as repulsive, but it is the further belief that Negroes have a peculiar and disagreeable body odor. A Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, giving her opinion of Negroes, had an idea that they carried a "musky odor," and were therefore to be avoided. A student at the University of Chicago and a resident of Hyde Park, talking with an investigator, said: "It is conceded that the Negro in Chicago must have some place to live, but to permit promiscuous distribution through scattered sections of the city would tend to increase the difficulties rather than mitigate them, partly because a white man would shrink from having a Negro live near him."

In the spring of 1919 there appeared in one of the Chicago daily papers a series of articles on the Negro question. In describing the relations between Negroes and whites in Chicago, the writer said:

A second phase of the situation, and the one that causes more inutile railing than any other, is the crowding into the street cars of colored people. Well, they must ride on street cars, if only for the reason that most of them live remote from their work. Even the North State Street line, that used to be considered the special conveyance for "the quality," has come to be known as the "African Central." If you can't stomach it, you'll have to walk. They won't.

Living in neighborhoods infrequently visited by Negroes and where, as a general rule, their occupancy is effectively discouraged, some white residents occasionally express objections as based on a "natural physical opposition." Following is a typical statement:

I came here six years ago and there was a very noisy set of white people living in the apartment house back of mine. Four years ago the landlord put them all out and rented to colored families. We were all up in arms then; but say, I never had nicer, more quiet, and respectable neighbors. Their children all behave well, and we can't kick. But at the same time, black people aren't what one would pick out to have around—I guess it's just because they are black.

Emotionality.—This is commonly regarded as explaining features of conduct in Negroes, some of which are beautiful in their expression while others are ugly and dangerous. The supposed Negro gift of song is thus an accepted attribute of his emotional nature. So with his religious inclination. This same emotionalism is believed to lead him to drink and is frequently made to account for "his quick, uncalculated crimes of violence." The natural expression of Negro religious fervor is supposed to be noisy and frenzied. This view of the Chicago Tribune's special writer is, roughly speaking, the view of thousands of Chicagoans:

I passed grand old stone churches, once the pride of rich and powerful white congregations, whither I used to be sent as a reporter not so many years ago, to hear some of the premier pulpiteers of this town. They are colored people's churches now, and beneath the arches, where a sedate gospel once was expounded you hear today the jubilant yell of the dusky brother who has found grace....

The service was, indeed, an incident in a three weeks' series of revival meetings they have been holding at Olivet. The principal performer was the Rev. S. E. J. Watson, a revivalist from Topeka, a big man—mulatto, I should say, or perhaps quadroon—with a powerful voice, a masterly platform style, and enormous ardor. He spoke fluently, used no notes, and demonstrated a free, wide skill in homely imagery, which, however, included no slang nor vulgarities, but was racy of the plantation and the cabin kitchen. His picture of God "opening the front door of this good old world every morning to let in the sun" was one of the most gorgeous flights in primitive poetry I ever heard, and his narrative, accompanied by the most vivid pantomime, of the Roman soldiers lifting up the cross after they had nailed Jesus to it was hardly less than terrifying—it certainly was terrific—in its sweep of passion and its reality of detail.

And so he wrought them to a high emotional state. Many were crying. Then came the direct personal appeal to "the unsaved," the threat of the everlasting fire, and the "lifting up" again and again of the thought of the all-forgiving, all-saving Jesus. The soft crying became heavy, convulsive sobbing. One by one the unsaved who made the surrender to whatever it was that had been holding them back, were led to the seats near the pulpit. Those who did not surrender promptly were evidently in terrible stress, or thought they were. They emitted shrieks that, truly, made my heart stand still, and I would have trembled for the sanity of the poor creatures except that I observed from the corner of my eye that the "saved" in the assemblage took the shrieks with perfect equanimity.

2. SECONDARY BELIEFS

In addition to the primary beliefs there are others supposedly not so serious or significant in their effects. These are usually modifications of primary beliefs, and are accepted as a consequence of frequent and almost unvaried repetition. In this manner these secondary beliefs have edged their way into the popular mind.

George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in a recent volume, The American Credo, point out fairly striking instances of this tendency of the American mind. They have compiled a series of 435 commonly accepted beliefs covering a wide range. Among these 435 listed American beliefs there are some very real ones which involve and include the following popular notions about Negroes:

1. That a Negro's vote may always be readily bought for a dollar.

2. That every colored cook has a lover who never works and that she feeds him by stealing the best part of every dish she cooks.

3. That every Negro who went to France with the army has a liaison with a white woman and won't look at a colored woman any more.

4. That all male Negroes can sing.

5. That if one hits a Negro on the head with a cobblestone the cobblestone will break.

6. That all Negroes born south of the Potomac can play the banjo and are excellent dancers.

7. That whenever a Negro is educated he refuses to work and becomes a criminal.

8. That every Negro servant girl spends at least half of her wages on preparations for taking the kink out of her hair.

9. That all Negro prize fighters marry white women and then afterwards beat them.

10. That all Negroes who show any intelligence are two-thirds white and the sons of U.S. Senators.

11. That the minute a Negro gets eight dollars he goes to a dentist and has one of his front teeth filled with gold.

12. That a Negro ball always ends up in a grand free-for-all fight in which several Negroes are mortally slashed with razors.

The most usual of these secondary beliefs which figure in the experience of Negroes and whites in Chicago are apparently of southern origin. This is due, not so much to any deliberate effort of southerners to infiltrate them into northern race relations, as that northerners largely regard as authoritative the experience of the South which holds almost nine-tenths of the total Negro population.

Some of the secondary beliefs are:

1. That Negroes are lazy; that they are indisposed to, though not incapable of, sustained physical exertion.

2. That they are happy-go-lucky; that their improvidence is demonstrated in their extravagance, and that their reckless disregard for their welfare is shown in a lack of foresight for the essentials of well-being. It is asserted that they do not purchase homes and do not save their money; that they spend lavishly for clothes to the neglect of home comforts and the demands even of their health; that they work by the day, and before the week is ended confuse bookkeeping by demanding their pay.

3. That they are boisterous. Hilarity in public places and especially in their own gatherings is thought to be common. They are considered as rude and coarse in public conveyances and are believed to jostle white passengers sometimes without thought and sometimes out of pure maliciousness.

4. That they are bumptious; that when a Negro is placed in a position of unaccustomed authority relative to his group he has an unduly exaggerated sense of his own importance and makes himself unbearable.

5. That they are overassertive; that constant harping on constitutional rights is a habit of Negroes, especially of the newer generation; that in their demands for equal rights and privileges they are egged on by agitators of their own race and are overinsistent in their demands; that they resent imaginary insults and are generally supersensitive.

6. That they are lacking in civic consciousness. Absence of community pride and disregard for community welfare are alleged to be the common failing of Negroes. It is pointed out that the "Black Belt" has been allowed to run down and become the most unattractive spot in the city. To this fact is attributed the tolerance of vice within this region. Negroes generally, it is still believed, can be bought in elections with money and whiskey. They are charged with having no pride in the beauty of the city, and with making it unbeautiful by personal and group habits.

7. That they usually carry razors. Whenever a newspaper reporter is in doubt he gives a razor as the weapon used. Some time ago a woman was found murdered in a town near Chicago. She had been slashed with a razor, and the broken blade was left beside her body. The murder was particularly atrocious, and the murderer left no other clew. Several Negroes were arrested on suspicion but were released when a white youth confessed the crime.

A Negro lawyer said:

During the riot a Negro was arrested for having a razor in his pocket. I was his attorney, and the evidence showed that he always shaved at work. After having shaved at this particular time, he put his razor in his pocket and forgot it. He started home and was accosted by two officers, who searched him and found the razor. The judge heard the evidence and then whispered to me that he was going to give the fellow ten days because "you know your people do carry razors." He asked me if I thought it all right and I said that I did not.

8. That they habitually "shoot craps." The Negro's supposed fondness for gambling is a phase of the belief concerning his improvidence. It is not unusual for whites, in conversation with any Negro whom they do not know well, when they wish merely to be friendly, to refer to dice. Employers frequently say that Negroes never keep money because as soon as it is earned it is thrown away on gambling with dice. The state's attorney believed that the riot of July, 1919, began over a beach craps game.

Negroes are believed to be flashy in dress, loving brilliant and gaudy colors, especially vivid red. Again, they are believed by white unionists to be natural strike breakers with deliberate intentions to undermine white living standards. Similarly they are believed to be fond of gin. Pauperism among them is believed to be unduly high, and they are thought to have no home life.

II. BACKGROUND OF PREVAILING BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Lying back of the current opinions about Negroes is a chain of circumstances involving the history of divers racial groups over hundreds of years. Slavery placed a stamp upon Negroes which it will require many more years to erase. Probably there would have been no doubt at all in the minds of Americans that essential inequalities existed between white and Negro had not their emancipation developed numerous unsuspected qualities. Thomas Jefferson is responsible for the observation that "a Negro could scarcely be found who was capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid." John C. Calhoun asserted that if a Negro could be found capable of giving the syntax of a Greek verb he would be disposed to call him human. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution fixed the Negro's status by law, and as soon afterward as his broader contacts with American institutions provided an outlet for more human participation, serious questions concerning his fitness for citizenship were put. The first studies that followed have been accepted for many years as the standard of judgment.

Mentality.—Regarding Negro mentality, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, anatomist of Harvard University, about 1870, said: "It cannot be denied that the Negro and ourang do afford the point where man and the brute, when the totality of their organization is considered, most nearly approach each other."

As a corollary he adds:

The Negro may be a man and a worker in some secondary sense; he is not a man and a brother in the same full sense in which every Western Aryan is a man and a brother. To me the Negro is repulsive.

The Negro is not yet a man and he is not yet a brother to the white. It will take generations, no man can say how many, to bring him to the level of supreme Caucasian man. He will have to reduce the facial angle and he will have to have a more spacious cranium before he can come into brotherhood with the more advanced species of mankind.

Professor A. H. Keane, author of Man Past and Present, at least gave some sanction to the disposition to regard the Negro and Caucasian races as having nothing in common. To quote from his book, published in 1890:

No historic or scientific reason can be alleged why these races, black or white, should be grouped together under one appellation if by such name it is meant to convey the idea that the human type can have any sanguinary affiliation. In the Negro groups it is absolutely shown that certain African races, whether born in Africa or America, give an internal capacity almost identical of 83 cubic inches. It is demonstrated through monumental, cranial and other testimonials, that the various types of mankind have ever been permanent; have been independent of all physical influences for thousands of years.

Dr. J. C. Nott, scientist and author of Types of Mankind said:

It is mind and mind alone which constitutes the proudest prerogative of man, whose excellence should be measured by his intelligence and virtue. The Negro and other unintellectual types have been shown in another chapter to possess heads much smaller, by actual measurement in cubic inches, than the white races; and although metaphysicians may dispute about causes which have debased their intellects and precluded their expansion, it cannot be denied that these dark races are, in this particular, greatly inferior to the others of fairer complexion.

This school of anthropology very clearly belongs to the period of slavery when it was necessary to rationalize the wishes of persons who, in order to treat Negroes as if they were mentally different, had first to convince, then justify, themselves in so doing.

Following them was another type of scientific writers who, while assuming that Negroes possessed brains, denied that they were like those of white persons or ever could be.

G. Stanley Hall thought that the Negro's development came to at least partial standstill at puberty. E. B. Tylor, author of Anthropology, assumed, from the accounts of European teachers who had taught children of the "lower" races, that after the age of twelve the colored children fell off and were left behind by the white children. Odum thought that the Negro child's mental development ended at the age of thirteen. None of these opinions, however, was the result of experimentation. A. T. Smith, author of A Study of Race Psychology, is responsible for the association and memory study of what he called a "typical" Negro boy of sixteen years. He discovered that "the Negro child is psychologically different from the white child, superior in automatic power but decidedly inferior in the power of abstraction, judgment and analysis." A. McDonald, author of Colored Children—A Psycho-physical Study, gave physical and mental tests in 1899 to ninety-one Negro children and concluded that dulness in colored children sets in between thirteen and sixteen. M. J. Mayo, author of The Mental Capacity of the American Negro, in 1913 studied 150 white and 150 colored high-school pupils in the schools of New York, and found the efficiency of colored pupils 76 per cent of that of the white. His selection included a large number of emigrants from the South, which, he explained, would increase the quality of the colored group, since only the more ambitious Negroes would seek to better their conditions by moving North. No account was taken of the defective school system of the South. Phillips made a study of retardation in the schools of Philadelphia and concluded that the course of study was not suited to Negroes, since colored children showed a greater degree of retardation than the whites.

Charles Carroll's book on the Negro points out by texts drawn from the Bible that the Negro is a beast created with an articulate tongue and hands in order that he may serve his white master. To bear out this theory Carroll's book says that man has been created in the image of God, but since, as everyone knows, God is not a Negro, it follows that the Negro is not in the image of God; therefore he is not a man.

There is a plain explanation of the origin of these beliefs. The science of anthropology itself has remarkably advanced during the past fifty years. When Negroes emerged from slavery, illiterate and unaccustomed to freedom, it was natural that their condition should be accepted as evidence that they could neither learn nor absorb the standards of the civilization around them. But although their illiteracy, for example, has decreased from 98 to 27 per cent, the original beliefs persist.

Morality.—The reputation of Negroes for immorality is based largely on southern authority and is historically explained by reference to slavery, in which state immorality is asserted to have been common between the master and the woman slave. There are many authorities on this character trait. Perhaps the most pretentious study on this subject is by Howard O. Odum in "Studies in History, Economics and Public Law," Columbia University, 1910. It is called A Study in Race Traits, Tendencies and Prospects. Writing of immorality among Negroes, Odum says:

It has generally been assumed that the Negro is differentiated by a distinct sexual development. It is affirmed that the sex development crowds out the mental growth. It is affirmed that the period of puberty in boys and girls is marked by special manifestations of wildness and uncontrol. It is true, too, that the practices of the Negroes leave little energy for moral and mental regeneration. Their lives are filled with that which is carnal; their thoughts are most filthy and their morals are generally beyond description. Again, physical developments from childhood are precocious and the sex life begins at a ridiculously early period. But granting these truths, it is doubtful if there is sufficient evidence to warrant such a conclusion. The Negro reveals a strong physical nature; the sex impulse is naturally predominant. But its manifestations are probably no more violent and powerful than are the expressions of other feelings already suggested. The Negro's sensuous enjoyment of eating and drinking and sleeping, relatively speaking, are no less marked than his sexual propensities. Likewise lack of control and extreme manifestations characterize the discharge of other impulses. It is true, again, that the part played by sexual life among the Negroes is large for a people; but to state that the Negro is inherently differentiated and hindered by a sexual development out of proportion to other physical qualities is quite a different proposition. But whether the question here raised is answered in the affirmative or not, it still remains that in the practical life of the Negro his better impulses are warped and hindered by his unreasonable abuse of sexual license. And it is safe to suggest that the Negro need hope for little development of his best qualities until he has learned to regulate and control his animal impulses.

Statistics on illegitimate births and abortions are frequently quoted as evidence of Negro immorality. It is further asserted, with rarely an attempt at correction, that these immoral tendencies are responsible for rape and attempted rape of white women.

Tradition maintains that it is a part of Negro nature to desire a white woman and similarly a part of his nature to be lacking in those restraints and inhibitions which might control this desire. C. H. McCord, author of The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent, said: "The average Negro is a child in every essential element of character, exhibiting those characteristics that indicate a tendency to lawless impulse and weak inhibition."

Numerous magazine articles and written studies in the South on this subject have given weight to this belief through sheer repetition. It is now not necessary to prove assertions or present an array of instances; they are taken for granted. Allusions to the "well-known immoral character" of the Negro or his instinctive tendency to commit sex crimes appear to carry as strong an impress of certainty as proved conclusions.

Other supposed social characteristics.—Discussions of each of the characteristics mentioned and many others are found in the literature on the subject. It will suffice here to give selections typical of the trend of descriptions to indicate the manner in which the picture of the Negro in practically every phase of his life has been set. Of his industrial habits Odum, in the social study of the Negro, says:

In any discussion of the economic situation this (the question of the efficiency of Negro labor) is an important consideration. A portion of the Negroes wander about and seek to get a living as best they can without working for it; they must necessarily live at the expense of the other Negroes and the whites. The number of vagrants in every community is surprisingly large. They are naturally divided into several groups; those who never work but wander from place to place, never fixed and without a home, stealing, begging, and obtaining a living from any source possible. Such men never work except when forced to do so in little jobs or on the streets or in the chain gang.

Of the Negro's social affairs he says:

The description of one of these [Negro] dances would be repulsive. The Negroes have "good times" on such occasions and will go a long distance to attend. The whole trend of the dance is toward physical excitation; they are without order and the influence is totally bad.

Of the condition of the Negro's home:

It will be seen that there is little orderly home life among the Negroes. Health conditions and daily habits are no better than the arrangement of the house. Sometimes an entire family consisting of father, mother, large and small children occupy the same rooms. Nor do they ventilate, and especially when any of the inmates are sick they are loath to let in the fresh air. Physicians testify that three or four often sleep in a bed together; they do not change clothing before going to bed in many cases, and often go for many days without a change of garments. It has been suggested that the personal habits of the Negroes are filthy; such is the case. Filth and uncleanness are everywhere predominant.

Of his religion:

In spite of pretentions and superficiality, there is nothing so real to the Negro as his religion, although it is a different "reality" from what we commonly expect in religion. The Negro is more excitable in his nature, and yields more readily to excitement than does the white man. The more a thing excites him, the more reality it has for him....

The criminal instinct appears to overbalance any consciousness which makes for righteousness, and the Negro has little serene consciousness of a clean record; he is ready to rush at any surprising or suspicious turn of affairs. The Negro does not value his word of honor; he apparently cannot always tell the truth. Only about one in every ten will keep an important engagement made in seriousness.

The Negro's conception of heaven and hell, God and the devil are very distinct. Heaven is an eternal resting-place where he shall occupy the best place. He sings of his heavenly home in striking contrast to his earthly abode. Perhaps for the reason that the Negroes have little satisfactory home life, they expect to have a perfect home in the next life.

Of his finer emotions:

While it is doubtful if there is enough evidence to warrant a full statement concerning the affections of the Negroes, it is apparently based on the gregarious impulse and upon a passive sympathy rather than upon individual emotions intellectually developed. The emotion is rarely of long duration.... The Negro mother rarely mourns for her wandering child, or sits up at night waiting for his return or thinking of him. The father shows little care except that of losing a laborer from his work.... The Negro has no loved ones. Numbers were asked for the names of those whom they considered friends or whom they loved or those who loved them. The question was put in various ways with different subjects, but the returns were the same.... But as a rule the Negro is without friendship among his own people.

It may help to comprehend the range of conclusions found in the literature on the subject of Negro traits of character to note the array of descriptive adjectives employed, thus: sensual, lazy, unobservant, shiftless, unresentful, emotional, shallow, patient, amiable, gregarious, expressive, appropriative, childish, religious, unmoral, immoral, ignorant, mentally inferior, criminal, excitable, imitative, repulsive, poetic, irresponsible, filthy, unintellectual, bumptious, overassertive, superficial, indecent, dependent, untruthful, musical, ungrateful, loyal, sporty, provincial, anthropomorphic, savage, brutish, happy-go-lucky, careless, plastic, docile, apish, inferior, cheerful.

Much might be said of influences which have operated to counteract the opinion-making literature as to the utterly hopeless condition of Negroes. The object of this study, however, is not to attack these conclusions, but merely to cite them as indicating how certain attitudes detrimental to racial friendliness and understanding have had their rise.

In academic circles the more balanced opinions of anthropologists are gaining some headway. Franz Boaz, probably the foremost anthropologist in the United States, in The Mind of Primitive Man, maintains:

Our considerations make it probable that the wide differences between the manifestations of the human mind in various stages of culture may be due almost entirely to the form of individual experience, which is determined by the geographical and social environment of the individual. It would seem that, in different races, the organization of the mind is on the whole alike, and that the variations of mind found in different races do not exceed, perhaps not even reach, the amount of normal individual variation in each race. It has been indicated that, notwithstanding this similarity in the form of individual mental processes, the expression of mental activity of a community tends to show a characteristic historical development.

This author in an article in the Nation for December, 1920, comments thus on Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color:

Mr. Stoddard's book is one of the long series of publications devoted to the self-admiration of the white race, which begins with Gobineau and comes down to us through Chamberlain and, with increasingly passionate appeal, through Madison Grant to Mr. Stoddard. The newer books of this type try to bolster up their unscientific theories by an amateurish appeal to misunderstood discoveries relating to heredity and give in this manner a scientific guise to their dogmatic statements which misleads the public. For this reason the books must be characterized as vicious propaganda, and gain an attention not warranted by an intrinsic merit in their learning or their logic.

Each race is exceedingly variable in all of its features, and we find in the white race, as well as in all other races, all grades of intellectual capacity, from the imbecile to the man of high intellectual power. It is true that intellectual power is hereditary in the individual, and that the healthy, the physically and mentally developed individuals of a race, if they marry among themselves, are liable to have offspring of a similar excellence; but it is equally true that the inferior individuals in a race will also have inferior offspring. If, therefore, it were entirely a question of eugenic development of humanity, then the aid of the eugenist would be to suppress not the gifted strains of other races, but rather the inferior strains of our own race. A selection of the intelligent, energetic and highly endowed individuals from all over the world would not by any means leave the white race as the only survivors, but would leave an assembly of individuals who would probably represent all the different races of man now in existence.

Jean Finot, in Race Prejudice, says:

When we go through the list of external differences which appear to divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize their division into superior and inferior beings, into masters and pariahs. If this division exists in our thought, it only came there as the result of inexact observations and false opinions drawn from them.

The science of inequality is emphatically a science of white people. It is they who have invented it and set it going, who have maintained, cherished, and propagated it, thanks to their observations and their deductions. Deeming themselves greater than men of other colours, they have elevated into superior qualities all the traits which are peculiar to themselves, commencing with the whiteness of the skin and the pliancy of the hair. But nothing proves that these vaunted traits are traits of real superiority.

W. I. Thomas, in Sex and Society, concludes his discussion of relative mentality with this statement:

The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the beginning—perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of mutations—a type of brain developed which has remained relatively fixed in all times and among all races. This brain will never have any faculty in addition to what it now possesses, because as a type of structure it is as fixed as the species itself, and is indeed a mark of species. It is not apparent that we are greatly in need of another faculty, or that we could make use of it even if by a chance mutation it should emerge, since with the power of abstraction we are able to do any class of work we know anything about.

III. TYPES OF SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES

In the South the relations between the white and Negro races are determined by custom as well as law, which, however, permit the close personal relationships of family servants. In the North, when these relations become more impersonal and contacts are widened through change of occupation from domestic service to industry, these close personal ties are weakened. There is no established rule of conduct binding on whites and Negroes in their relations with each other; and although traditional beliefs may influence present relations in the North, they do not always dominate them. So it happens that there are to be found shades of opinion concerning Negroes varying from deliberate indifference to vituperative abuse of Negroes, whatever the subject, depending on one's beliefs about them. The selections of sentiment which follow are examples collected at random over the city—through interviews and discussions, from group publications, speeches and reports. They illustrate the real sentiments that white persons express when brought into contact with Negroes, or when their opinions are solicited.

1. THE EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND

Hostile sentiment.—The refusal of Policeman Callahan to arrest Stauber, a white youth accused of throwing stones which resulted in the drowning of Eugene Williams, is regarded as the significant incident precipitating the riot of 1919 (see p. 4). Callahan was dismissed from the force, but reinstated. One year later, when questioned by an investigator for the Commission, he gave his racial philosophy freely in the following remarks:

So far as I can learn the black people have since history began despised the white people and have always fought them.... It wouldn't take much to start another riot, and most of the white people of this district are resolved to make a clean-up this time.... If a Negro should say one word back to me or should say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of young men of the district, mostly ex-service men, who would procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble should come from the incident.

The following is from a letter written by a white employee of Albert Pick & Company:

Negroes in street cars refuse to double up with others of their race, but seem to delight in sitting beside some dainty white girl.

The Thirty-fifth Street cars are crowded by low-grade "plantation niggers" who crowd on at Ashland Avenue via windows and doors, then awkwardly step and fall over passengers; it is maddening. About this time girls from Albert Pick & Company, the Magnus Company, and the tailoring establishments are crowded together breast to breast with Negroes. Often he falls asleep and leans on his white seatmate's shoulder.

Laws should be urged preventing intermarriage.

Assaults upon white women are frequent, but hushed up by fear of newspaper publicity, and the Negro is thus encouraged in his felony.

In cases where a white girl is involved in an assault case by a colored man, the white woman should be shielded, and her name withheld from the newspapers and public, before and after the trial. This will prevent race riots.

A movement is now afoot to declare a silent boycott against employers of colored help.

A physician living on Oakwood Boulevard said: "The increasing amount generally of sex immorality is being contributed to by mixing Negroes and whites in schools and parks."

A teacher in the Felsenthal School said:

The colored people are coming from the South all the time, for political purposes. It's propaganda for the colored man to sit down by the white woman, and not to double up to make room for the whites. Their papers tell them to do it. I was the only white person in an empty car one day and a colored man came in and took the seat beside me.

Fear.—From White Americans circulated in Chicago:

In the United States Negroes not only vote and hold office, but the Negro vote is the deciding factor in the national elections, and also in many of the northern cities, and they trade their vote for jobs and offices and other privileges. The Negroes control the great city of Philadelphia, and the press said the Negro delegates at the Republican Convention in Chicago openly offered to sell their support to the presidential candidate who would pay the most money. Just think this thing over, you sovereign United States citizens: the Negroes control the elections, and thus your law-makers, judges, and officials; and the Negroes have so much pull and confidence, that they not only defend their political rights, but they start riots and race wars, and openly threaten that they are going to make the white folks stand around.

Fear and pity.—A resident in the 6600 block on Langley Avenue said:

A colored family lives next door north of me, and you'll be surprised when I tell you that I haven't been able to open my bedroom window on that side to air that room for three years. I couldn't think of unlocking the windows because their window is so near somebody could easily step across into this house. It's awful to have to live in such fear of your life.

When asked if she considered her neighbors so dangerous as that, she said:

Well, no, the woman seems pretty nice. I see her out in the back yard occasionally and bid her the time of day out of charity. You can't help but pity them, so I am charitable and speak. Where the danger really is, is that you never know who's in their house; they bring such trash to the neighborhood, even if they are good and decent. How do I know what kind of people this woman next door associates with? There's awful-looking people sit on the front porch sometimes. Why, I couldn't sit on my porch on the hottest day because I'd be afraid they would come out any minute. And what white person will sit on a porch next door to a porch with black ones on it? Not me, anyhow, nor you either I hope.

Hostile but resigned.—A resident near Dorchester Avenue and Sixtieth Street said:

I have nothing against the black man as a black man. He comes into my place of business (drug-store) and I sell him. Not many come in, as there aren't a lot of colored people around Sixty-third and Woodlawn or Dorchester. But I don't want to live with niggers any more than you or any other white person does. People who say, "I like the colored people and don't see why others can't get along with them" don't talk practical common sense. Theoretically all this talk is all right, but you get a white man of this sort to come right down and live with a nigger and he won't do it.

Niggers are different from whites and always will be, and that is why white people don't want them around. But the only thing we can do, it seems to me, is make the best of it and live peaceably with them. The North can never do what the South does—down there it is pure autocracy. I might say like Russia. That might have worked here in the North from the start, but can't be started now, and we wouldn't want such autocracy anyway. They are citizens, and it is up to us to teach them to be good ones. How it can be done I don't know—it will have to come slow, and no one can give a solution offhand. Everybody says, "We don't want the niggers with us." Well, here they are, and we can't do anything. Must let them live where they want to and go to school where they want to, and we don't want to force their right away.

It is not uncommon to find in some circles and with many individuals a resolute indisposition to discuss any phase of the Negro problem. Convictions regarding the race are so firmly set and hostile that no argument or appeal to fair-mindedness can alter their position.

"Eye Witness," a special writer for the Chicago Tribune, encountered this state of mind in interviewing whites and Negroes for a series of articles on the Negro question which appeared in the Tribune in May, 1919. He characterized it as insensate and dangerous. His own statement, published May 4, 1919, said:

Among men like publicists and administrators of large affairs, who, when they discuss the problems and troubles of their race, are wont to speak in a rational, or at least mannerly way, there was often an unfeeling kind of don't-give-a-damn cry when they talked on this subject that made one wonder how they had managed so well in maintaining a human and successful relationship with their white associates in business and with their employees.

I heard more, far more, insensate language from the lips of white men than of black men throughout the series of interviews. The horrible part of that, to me, was that when a white employer more or less accountable for the well-being of colored workmen, or a publicist entrusted with a pen that forms and directs opinions, had railed about "these damn niggers" they appeared to think they had said something rather gallant and decisive, for they would smile fatuously and expect acquiescence.

And more terrible than the language was the insensate state of mind such language betrayed. The only way one could avoid the suspicion that one was listening to a potential lunatic or a desperately stupid person without a human or a community sense, was to allow much for the vehemence of the American tongue and to concede that these men don't mean one-tenth of what they say. If they did they would be fomenters of race wars.

2. SENTIMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS

Sentiment for the "old family servants."—A white physician born in the South said:

My father owned slaves. He looked out for them; told them what to do. He loved them and they loved him. I was brought up during and after the war. I had a "black mammy" and she was devoted to me and I to her; and I played with Negro children. In a way I'm fond of the Negro; I understand him and he understands me; but the bond between us is not as close as it was between my father and his slaves. On the other hand, my children have grown up without black playmates and without a "black mammy." The attitude of my children is less sympathetic toward the Negroes than my own. They don't know each other.

Paternal relationship.—In testimony before the Commission a witness said:

The prejudice against the colored people in the South isn't as strong in some instances as it is in the North. It's a queer thing, but the white man in the South, and the white woman, too, has a sort of paternal feeling that he must look after him and that the colored man's interests are better in his hands than if he is left to drift for himself. I don't state that as an actual fact, but I believe it is true. That is their point of view. They don't hate the colored man. They don't dislike him, but I should say this, that they won't take him into their homes. They don't dislike him, provided he keeps his place. I believe the white people of the South think more of the Negro than the white people of the North.

3. ABSTRACT JUSTICE

A trained nurse of Woodlawn said:

I meet colored people only on the cars. There are none anywhere around here, I believe. I don't know how I would feel if they came to Woodlawn to live. But they must live, and I hear their quarters are getting too small. It seems that Chicago ought to let them live somewhere. Some people treat Negroes terrible and I think that is all wrong. Why can't we act respectably toward colored people on the cars and treat them nice on the street? We surely don't want to be like the people in the South who make colored persons get off the walk when they come along. But I see white people here almost that bad—can't see a black man live.

The pastor of a church in Woodlawn said:

I have come to no final conclusion as to the best policy to pursue in the adjustment of the race problem. I am thinking about it a great deal and am deeply concerned over the whole matter. In the present state of popular mind, there is no doubt but property values are depreciated by the presence of Negro tenants or property owners in residential sections. However, if everyone felt as I do, it would not be so. I mean, provided that the same general social standards were observed by all nationalities in the city. It would be very fine, it seems to me, to maintain certain standards in each neighborhood. Why not bring pressure to bear on white landlords and make them keep their property up to a given average standard in the community, that only such a class of people will rent or buy as are already there? I am very anxious that the Negro shall be treated fairly. I do not want him to feel that I have stood in the way of his opportunities and his rights.

A professor at the University of Chicago said:

The final solution, it seems to me, must come as a result of honest and successful efforts for mutual understanding between the races. There must be apparent on the part of the white race an attempt to treat the Negro with justice, and I feel sure that he will respond. I do not think the black race, as a race, desires intermarriage more than the white race, yet the assertion to the contrary is much overworked by the white opposition in these neighborhoods.

A minister said:

All I want for the Negro is justice—then I think the economic laws will settle this problem. Let the people interested try justice; they will find it will solve the race problem faster than any other course, just as it will solve any other problem. Treat the bad Negro just as rough as you treat the bad white man, but acclaim the good Negro after the same manner of your acclamation of the good white man.

4. SENTIMENTS STRONGER THAN RACE PREJUDICE

Class kinship stronger than race.—A Swedish employee in a department store said:

We have quite a number of Negro neighbors where I live, and several black men work with me, and I want to say I think they are just as good as anybody. There are classes of people in every race, and of course there is a rough element among the blacks. Some highbrows try to make out that they are representative, but I think opposition to the Negro in Chicago comes from the "swell" class. I do not have any different feeling for them than for the same kind of people in any other race. I think race relations will get better in Chicago. The workingman has learned that the Negro will treat him right when he is treated right, and as soon as the other folks find that out, things will be all right.

The secretary of the Cook County Labor Party said:

I have thought about this problem a good deal, and I think you will find it is the so-called middle class that is making all the trouble. The laboring-man does not care who his neighbor is, so long as he is a good neighbor. I think you can trace most of the racial activities to jealousy on the part of a certain class of American citizens who are not any too wealthy and feel constrained to maintain a sort of fictitious position in life at the expense of anybody, in this case the Negroes. You will find that the very well-to-do are not nearly so much aroused over the problem.

A Japanese said:

I think it is simply a matter of race prejudice, which of course means first of all that the color is not acceptable, while, in the second place, they were imported to the United States as slaves, and thus it always occurs in the American mind that they are a lower class of people. Furthermore, as they were slaves and the American does not like them, they don't have equal opportunities to educate themselves up to such a degree which means no more than environment. In the last place, they want to keep away from them. I think it might be said that they are willing to receive lower wages, which tends to lower the wage system; thus the American worker suffers a good deal. In the whole process the Negroes have been kept out of social and political activities that would have given them a chance to develop. Allow them to have these activities in the future and they will make more rapid progress than they have even in the past.

General historical comparisons.—A Jewish resident of the West Side said:

I believe that the segregation movement is wrong because it is unjust and because it is devoid of any principle whatever. It has not risen out of the consideration of the needs of the colored people, nor out of consideration of real advantages that the whites might thereby gain. What is back of race prejudice? Nothing more than the spirit of superiority and selfishness which moves the aristocrats to move out of a neighborhood as soon as a few common people move in. This is here too prevalent. The segregation movement has its parallel in history. Who does not remember the old Jewish Ghetto of Amsterdam, Frankfort, etc., or the Pale of Russia? What has this segregation done for the Jews? It curtailed their rise, depriving them of an opportunity to develop, and I foresee the same result in the new segregation movement, and therefore deem it a great public evil and moral issue.

5. TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN BACKGROUND

A window dresser said:

I am from the South, and I am used to seeing the Negro kept in his place. I would colonize them, every one of them, and make them stay where they are put. I would colonize them in Africa if I had to do it. There's where they came from and there's where they belong. Of course, some few northern folks say that they were taken away against their own wills, but I say they ought to go back against their own wills.

The woman manager of a tailor shop, Fifty-fifth Street, said: "I am a southerner, and I feel the way they all do about it. I guess you know what I mean. I think the nigger should stay in his place."

6. GROUP SENTIMENTS

Fear of social censure.—A property owner at Langley Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street said:

"I am not proud to be living on the same street with Negroes, so I never tell my friends—they would say: 'You must move out.'"

George L. Giles Post of the American Legion is a Negro post with headquarters at the South Side Branch of the Community Service. Invitations to a musicale and dramatic entertainment for the benefit of ex-service men were sent to all the local posts by the Community Service. It was responded to by the adjutant of George L. Giles Post, who received a reply from the executive secretary saying:

I am quite sure you will understand that our sending one to the George L. Giles Post was a slip. Will you kindly let me know if there are other Posts of colored men in the city?

Similar recognition of the force of public opinion may be found in industry. The manager of a large industrial plant, speaking of Negro workmen, said: "I have a feeling that white workers would object to Negroes in any position but that of common laborers, although I have no basis for this opinion." Another said: "I have heard whites remark that they wouldn't want to work here if many colored were employed but none left on that account."

7. ATTITUDES DETERMINED BY CONTACTS

No contacts but a hostile attitude.—A resident at Drexel Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street said:

I don't see many niggers around here; most of them are west of Cottage Grove Avenue. I never had any dealings with them, so can't tell you anything much. I know I don't want niggers living next door to me, but I can't tell you why. Do you want them next-door neighbors to you? There are some living down in the next block—two families of them—between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth, and I guess they are pretty wild, but I have never seen them. It's just what people tell me. I never had any dealings with them.

Generalization from a particular experience.—A teacher in the Wendell Phillips High School said:

You can't trust the best of them. The minute you have your back turned something disappears. They are the worst bunch of little thieves I ever struck. A few weeks ago I had a colored girl helping me fix costumes in my little office. During the hour she was in there I was absent about five minutes. She had hardly got out of the building before I discovered that a dollar had disappeared out of my purse. I questioned her for thirty minutes next morning, but not a word of confession. Another time I had small change in the top drawer of my desk. While I was teaching a class, two girls slipped into the office and helped themselves to half of it. I surprised them when I unexpectedly entered the office to get something. Everything here that isn't tied or watched walks off. It didn't used to be this way before the colored came in so thick; then I never locked my office, and now I have everything under lock.

The proprietor of a woman's dress shop on Sixty-third Street said:

Little of my trade is colored, possibly 2 per cent. We do not cater to colored trade. We do not want it. If colored people come in, we will sell them if they buy quick and get out. Our trade does not care to deal where colored people are also accommodated.... You will find it pretty hard to be neutral in Chicago. The more I know of niggers, the more I am convinced that there is no good nigger but a dead one. I had a colored helper who wanted tips every time he was asked to render services outside of his recognized regular duties. I gave him a good salary, $18 per week, and yet he was never satisfied, and one day he got hold of the keys to the cash drawer and ran away with $300.

Exaggerated notion of prosperity.—A physician said:

I think that the solution of the race problem can come only by recognition by white men of the Negroes' potential equality. They are only fifty years out of slavery, and in that fifty years they have progressed faster than the white race has done in a hundred years. The Negro man of forty today is less advanced than the white man of forty, but I expect his son to be almost on a par with our sons, and his grandson will be every whit as good. The husband of the colored woman who has been getting our dinners for us for a number of years is making more killing steers for Armour than I am. He makes $16 a day. They have $12,000 worth of Liberty bonds. They are sending all of their relatives through high school and declare they will put them through the University of Chicago. In fact we are compelling the Negro to get an education, and he cannot help but progress. Colonizing the Negro is merely making him bitter and postponing the day of settlement. Presently we shall have with us under such a régime a race of comparative equals very much disgruntled by the unfair treatment accorded them. I think you will find that practically all the professional men in this building, at least a very large percentage of them, think as I do on this subject.

Contact with servants.—A resident of Woodlawn said:

Practically my only contact with Negroes is with servants and laundresses. I have had colored women working for me for many years, and the majority of them I could not trust outside my sight. By that I don't mean they would steal—they just weren't dependable. It is all wrong for colored children and white children to be in school together. There should be separate schools, because the two races of children are as different in everything as in their color.

The interviewing of hundreds of white persons, members of practically every social class, reveals little information regarding the sources of their beliefs about Negroes. Some think them instinctive; some hold that their opinions are a result of observation; some, who make discernible effort to stem the current of prejudiced views and remain fair, have read the books of Negroes. But by far the greater number either admit or otherwise give evidence of having absorbed their views from tradition.

Information by word of mouth, unquestioned statements, uncorrected accounts, all continue to add credence to any current interpretation of an act involving Negroes. The fault lies for the most part at the information source. Fairly to judge the Negro group, or any member thereof, there should be some unquestioned basis of fact, yet the assumption is common that almost any Negro can be judged by what has been observed in the conduct of the family cook or chauffeur, who no more represents the whole or the majority of Negroes than a white cook or chauffeur can be said to represent the whole or the majority of the white race.

IV. SELF-ANALYSIS BY FIFTEEN WHITE CITIZENS

To secure definite information upon this background twenty representative white persons were selected at random, and eighteen carefully prepared suggestive questions were put to each of them. The purpose was to draw out the raw material of their unqualified opinions on the question of the Negro, and to ascertain as far as possible the background in their early experiences. The questions were suggestive in order to compel a disclosure of mental attitudes. The only qualification in the selection of persons was their probable capacity for self-analysis and a willingness to answer. The length and difficulty of the questions put made it necessary to limit the selection of persons to a few, who in appreciation of the inquiry, could and would give it a careful study. Fifteen of these persons entered into the spirit of the inquiry and submitted the results of their self-scrutiny.

These fifteen include business and professional men and women, none of whom, however, is actively associated with racial movements. They represent probably a fair sample of sentiment and at the same time ability to analyze accurately their own feelings and opinions.

The questions put were as follows:

1. Have you formed definite opinions about Negroes? Briefly, what are they?

2. Do Negroes in your opinion possess distinguishing traits of mentality or character?

3. As well as you can remember, on what facts, authorities, information, sources, do you base your opinions?

4. What incidents or experiences involving Negroes either in Chicago or elsewhere stand out in your memory?

5. As a child, did you have contacts of any kind with Negroes?

6. Can you recall any early prohibitions of association by word or printed warnings of any sort, implied prohibitions in institutional or social arrangements?

7. When were you first conscious of a racial difference?

8. Whom of your friends, acquaintances, favorite authors, scholars, etc., do you regard as best fitted to speak with authority on the question?

9. Do you ever inquire for information on this subject? Whom do you ask? What Negroes do you know whom you would consider leaders among colored people in Chicago? in the United States?

10. Did you ever read a Negro periodical? What did you think of it?

11. What subjects of discussion most frequently lead to the Negro?

12. In what circles is this subject most frequently discussed?

13. If it were in your power to make whatever social adjustment you deemed wise, what disposition would you make of the Negro population?

14. If Negroes obstinately objected to your plan and you still had power, what would you do?

15. What do you think of the following propositions:

a) When you educate Negroes you increase their demands. Either their education should be curtailed or modified or their demands granted.

b) Prejudice has its principal basis in fear.

c) Isolating groups favors the unhampered development of special group prejudices. Do prejudices form a background of conflicts? The greater the isolation, the greater the prejudices and, as would naturally follow, the greater the chances of conflict.

d) A minority of the population should not expect complete justice at the hands of an overwhelming majority.

Their answers are given separately. The letters used to designate the different persons are arbitrary.

A—

I have rather definite opinions of Negroes. As a class they cannot be depended upon. They are shiftless and really must be treated like children. I make allowance for the fact that they have not the years of education back of them.

My opinions are based on visits made to the South and on information obtained from relatives who live in the South as well as from the colored help we have had. As a child my contact with Negroes began with our Negro house servants, and my first consciousness of a racial difference came while visiting relatives in the South. I know but two persons who might speak with authority on the race question. They are Edgar A. Bancroft and Miss Mary McDowell. It is very seldom that I inquire for information on this subject. People whom I know are not interested in the problem.

The only Negroes whom I know are my present colored help and those who have worked for me. I don't know whom to consider leaders among the colored people either in Chicago or in the United States. Concerning the Negro periodicals, I have occasionally read copies of one of their newspapers which bore out my opinion of their simple minds. Discussion of domestic help and of newspaper articles about Negroes and sociological conditions most frequently lead to the discussion of the Negro in my circle. If it were in my power to do so, I would segregate Negroes as to living quarters and do all possible to help them educate and help themselves.

Concerning proposition (a) I agree that if you educate Negroes, you increase their demands, but I also believe that as they become educated, greater demands will arise in their own groups.

In my opinion prejudice has its principal basis in the fact that one can't depend upon Negroes.

I do not believe that it is necessarily true that a minority of the population should not expect complete justice at the hands of the majority if the proper appeal is made.

B—

I have more or less definite opinions about Negroes. I believe that as a race they are entitled to more leniency and consideration than we would give to adult whites because as a race they are not as mature as whites. I think it is unfortunate that we have such a race question to deal with, but we ought to meet it squarely and insist that under the law Negroes are entitled to equal protection and equal consideration. I do not believe in any attempt at social equality because the antipathy between whites and Negroes is so acute that such attempt would not only break down itself but it would lead to serious race difficulties. I think the Negro race has as much right to protect its race purity as the white race. I believe Negro women are entitled to the same protection from white men that we demand on behalf of white women against black men. I believe Negroes should have decent housing conditions, proper social outlets and opportunities to earn a living at the same wages paid white men for the same class and character of work. They should share equally in the benefits of government, with particular reference to schools, bathing-beaches, playgrounds, parks, etc. They should be protected against exploitation by employers, property owners, merchants, etc.

I do think Negroes possess distinguishing traits of both mentality and character. For many years now I have come into more or less personal contact with Negroes. I have been in contact with them in public schools, in colleges, in politics and in civic work. I cannot say that any particular incidents or experiences stand out in my memory.

My opinions are based upon my personal observation, personal contacts with Negroes and discussions with other white persons having independent contacts. As a child I had practically no real contact of any kind with Negroes. I don't recall now any Negro children in any of my primary grades, and while there were Negroes in my native city, they were few and in a neighborhood far removed from my own home. I imagine that I was first conscious of a racial difference when I first saw a Negro.

I don't recall any early prohibition against association with Negroes although I do recall clearly that the attitude of my family and associates, generally, was not one of approval. Negroes were regarded as an inferior race, and I think as a child I gathered the impression that contact with them was to be avoided. My feeling is that if in normal circumstances I had been thrown into more or less contact with Negroes, prohibition against association, except where absolutely necessary, would have been forthcoming.

I have never formally asked for information on the subject, but I have discussed the matter with a good many people and have given thought to it. I know a good many Negroes, not only in Chicago but outside, but I don't know many of them intimately. Among the leaders of the Negroes in Chicago are Dr. Bentley, Dr. George C. Hall, Edward H. Morris, Edward H. Wright, Louis B. Anderson, Oscar De Priest. In the United States, since the death of Booker T. Washington, I imagine that two of the outstanding men are Mr. Moton and Professor Du Bois.

I am a subscriber to the Crisis. In general my feeling is that the tendency of this periodical is to stimulate and foster race feeling among the Negroes. I don't say this critically. It may be the best thing to do, considering all the circumstances, and anything that will make for growth in self-respect, character and initiative on the part of the Negroes is to be commended even if, at the same time, race spirit is fostered and developed.

Generally speaking, I find that discussion most frequently leads to the Negroes when there are questions of lynching, race riots, crimes or disturbances in which Negroes are involved. It also comes up in connection with public schools, churches, parks and public transportation systems. I had it arise recently in connection with the Naval Academy at Annapolis. My experience is that this subject is most frequently discussed among those interested in social problems.

I used to think that the Negro question might be best solved if the Negroes would be colonized in some favorable spot in Africa under an American protectorate until they were capable of self-government. I realize, however, that no such scheme ought to be attempted if the Negroes obstinately objected, and in that event I would see to it, if I had the power, that they were protected from exploitation, were given a square deal and had the equal protection of the laws. They should have schools adequate to their needs and average living conditions.

I believe the Negro race should be educated, but I believe at the same time that the most solid foundation for the race is education in accordance with the ideas of the late Booker T. Washington as I understand those ideas. While I think this type of education will mean more for the race in the long run I believe at the same time that individual Negroes should have an opportunity fully to develop individual capacities.

I think there is an element of fear in the prejudice of Negroes, but I don't think this is the chief element. I think the real basis for this prejudice is a racial antipathy that is instinctive and fundamental in the white race. I imagine that in individual cases where this prejudice does not exist it is not because it was not there originally, but because it has been overcome by reason and education. It isn't unlikely that this prejudice is in the main grounded upon an instinct in the white race to keep its strain pure and strong.

It seems to me that it isn't isolation so much as it is contact that favors the development of race prejudice. If the Negroes had never been brought out of Africa, we wouldn't feel the prejudice that we do. Or, if they were restricted to one or two southern states, prejudice in other parts of the country would rapidly disappear. A community that has no Negro problem is relatively free from prejudice. It is when the two races come into contact that prejudices run riot and race conflicts result. My own opinion is that if you should scatter the Negro population throughout Chicago and its suburbs and put one or two Negro families in every block, race prejudice would increase enormously.

A minority of the population will not get complete justice at the hands of an overwhelming majority. But this is true of all minorities, whether racial, political, or religious. All we can do is to keep working for an approximation to ideal justice. A minority has the right to demand, and a majority should be willing to grant, substantial justice and that is all that can be expected in the present state of civilization.

C—

My opinion is that we must cling to the ideal of Lincoln—the right of every human being to equality in the real sense of the term. I have found, however, that Negroes are dull and sensitive. These opinions are based upon observation at Tuskegee and in this school—[the Lewis Institute]. Among my outstanding experiences is a visit made to Tuskegee and meeting Booker T. Washington. The visit showed great hope for the Negro. As a child I had no contact aside from living in the same city with them.

It has always been considered unwise in the circles in which I moved for whites and blacks to associate socially. I first became conscious of a race difference when a very small child—about three years of age.

Booker T. Washington, Cable, Dunbar, southerners and northerners who have traveled in the South are probably best fitted to speak for Negroes. I do inquire of both Negroes and whites for information. The only Negroes I know are working people. Robert Jackson, alderman, and Ed. Green, lawyer. Booker T. Washington's successor. I have read one Negro paper. It was insistent in a very fair way on the political rights of the Negro. Good. Lynchings, lying, stealing, and the attacking of little girls are the subject of discussion that most frequently lead to the Negro, and these occur principally among men who have seen Negroes socially and women who have hired them.

As a solution I would colonize them in Africa, and if they objected I would use all peaceable means to force them to go.

Regarding the propositions: Their education should be increased and the demands produced by education met.

Prejudice has its basis in race repulsion. Unless the isolation is African colonization, there will be group prejudices.

Every man or group should demand and get complete justice.

D—

I assume that it is a fact recognized by science that Negroes are so different from whites that the two races cannot be amalgamated. This fact interposes a barrier to social relationships. I share in the general dislike of Negroes as neighbors or traveling companions on the street cars. The white race is responsible for the existence of the Negro problem in America, and must submit patiently to the penalty for many years to come. Lincoln's second inaugural is the best expression of this thought. The Negro race is extraordinarily docile and easy to handle. If surrounded by good living conditions and given a proper education they would be good citizens. The progress of their race since slavery, considering their many handicaps, has been very creditable. The prejudice against them is probably the most deep-seated of all American prejudices, and must be reckoned with as one of the great factors in the problem.

In my opinion they are characterized by distinctly inferior mentality, deficient moral sense, shiftlessness, good nature, and a happy disposition. I have in mind no special facts, authorities or sources of information on which I base my opinions. I do, however, recognize the bearing of Christianity on the problem, and find it impossible to formulate a viewpoint which I can reconcile with the demands of Christianity.

We had a Negro family chauffeur some years ago who misconducted himself so seriously as to have caused a very considerable increase in the family prejudice against the race. If he had been an Irish man our prejudice against him would not have extended to his race. As a child I had no contacts with Negroes, excepting one or two fellow-pupils in public schools of whom I saw very little, and a few servants in the neighborhood who were of the old-fashioned type, of pleasant memory.

I can recall no early prohibitions of association with Negroes. There were so few in my neighborhood that they constituted no real problem. As to implied prohibitions, I suppose I understood at a very early age the existing social difference, although I remember no instances of this.

I cannot remember when I first became conscious of a racial difference, but I assume it was at a very early age.

I do not know that I can cite any friends, acquaintances, favorite authors or scholars well fitted to speak with authority on the question. Lincoln's views always seemed true to me, while I have not been so favorably impressed by southern writers. Every southerner I have ever met, no matter how reasonable on other subjects, seemed to be incapable of looking at this question with an open mind. His confidence that he knew all about the Negro and the problem seemed absolute, and therefore he was not in position to learn. I occasionally inquire for information on this subject. Naturally most of the men of whom I have made inquiries have been white, as I come in contact with very few Negroes. I have, however, talked with Negroes who have expressed their willingness to be segregated if the segregation was complete enough to rid their district of all whites, and give them fair living conditions. I cannot say that I know any Negroes, although there are a few with whom I have sufficient acquaintance to talk with them occasionally. As to their leaders in Chicago, I have assumed that their political leaders and their ministers were their leaders, the ministers having a larger place of leadership than ministers among white people. I used to come in contact occasionally with colored lawyers who were capable men, and I believe leaders of their race, and I understand that there is a colored physician, whose name I cannot recall, who is the real leader of the best Negroes in Chicago. Nationally I could not name any since the death of Booker Washington, whom I very much admired, excepting Du Bois whom I have heard speak, and with whose views I do not sympathize. I do not remember ever reading a Negro periodical.

As I live on the South Side the subject of discussion most frequently leading to the Negro is their encroachment on white residence districts. Two years ago my church was given up to a colored congregation, and the church into which we were transferred is seriously threatened by the same invasion. Property interests in a large part of the South Side bring up the question, as does the unpleasantness of meeting them on the street cars. I do not hear serious constructive discussion in any circle. The invasion is deplored in all circles, social, business, church and others.

I would not undertake to make any social adjustment on my present information, except segregation of the Negroes in a part of the South Side, and this only if it had the approval of their own leaders. I do not approve of "Jim Crow" street cars for Chicago, although I would not insist on their abandonment in southern cities where they are already used, and I would not favor any radical change if the better Negroes obstinately objected.

I believe in educating Negroes, even though I am not sure to what it will lead. I hope that as the race progresses the prejudice against it will be modified. Still this prejudice is so very great that I think it would be foolish for the Negroes ever to seek a high station through demands. Probably many of their demands should be granted, but they will make greater progress by reckoning with the prejudice, and continuing their present conciliatory attitude.

I do not believe that prejudice is based on fear. There is, of course, a well-founded fear of many individual Negroes, but I do not believe that the white race is conscious of any fear of the Negro race as such. I think the prejudice is based on the relative inferiority of the Negro race.

As a general proposition this is doubtless true that isolation fosters prejudice. As applied to Negroes, however, it is doubtful whether it would produce more conflict than the present system. I would feel more hopeful of the overcoming of the prejudice through more intimate contact with Negroes if the difference between Negroes and white men were not so fundamental.

As an abstract proposition the despotism of a majority cannot be justified. I would say it is a very bad doctrine to spread among a majority, but has in it a certain amount of practical truth which the minority would do well to bear in mind.

E—

Negroes do possess distinguishing traits of mentality and character. My opinions are based upon my personal observation.

As I knew the Negro in the South he was inclined to be indolent, shiftless and lacking in a high sense of honesty, though religious. His disposition is a happy one, and often his good will is shown in many ways of gratitude and faithfulness. These traits I have seen expressed in service as servants, in the cotton fields, in their homes, and on town streets. In Chicago, when the Negro has long been a resident here, having larger advantages in education and employment, I find the colored man honest in business and other transactions, diligent at work, and inoffensive, but firmly standing for his citizenship rights, and wanting to live peaceably. My Chicago experience has been principally as a physician visiting in Negro homes.

When a boy I worked in the cotton fields with Negroes, and I attended some of their religious meetings for the sake of amusement. It was a social law in the South that we must not eat at the same table with Negroes, and we were not to sit with colored people when riding on street cars or on trains. However, if a Negro was driver of a horse and buggy, the most beautiful and refined woman might sit on the same seat with the colored driver. White people visiting a colored church were given seats to themselves, usually front seats. Colored children could not attend white schools. At the age of six when I first saw Negroes, I became conscious of a race difference.

I regard Rev. John R. Hayworth as fitted to advise on the question. I have sought information from about twenty-five Negroes when in their midst as their physician. I am acquainted with at least a dozen Negro families but can give the names of only three. I consider Alderman De Priest, Mr. Lucas and Colonel Jackson leading colored men; Dr. George Hall is also well known. I have never read a Negro periodical.

In Chicago the subject of undesirable neighbors leads to the discussion of Negroes in our neighborhood improvement clubs.

Believing that both black and white people prefer to live separately, I would make agreeable provision for separate locations in which each might live and in so doing abide by the wish of the majority and enforce its dictates.