Where Negroes have come in and as a result white people have moved out and the neighborhood has, plainly speaking, deteriorated, there is a great tendency to permit infractions of the law, as in any neighborhoods which are regarded as not as important as high-class residence neighborhoods. For instance, Calumet Avenue from Thirty-first to Thirty-ninth streets is entirely colored. Fifteen years ago it was entirely white. Now it would be much easier to establish vice there than it would have been fifteen years ago when a lot of well-known people lived in the neighborhood.

Most of the Negroes found in disorderly houses are employees. There was one notorious place down there that we closed where they were all colored. That was the most notorious one we had.

I think there is this to be said about the colored side of it there [on the South Side]: I am asked whether the colored protest against disorderly resorts would be as effective as a protest made by an equal number of white men. Making allowance for the fluctuating conditions in a long period, I don't believe it would be quite as effective. Not only that, but I don't think the colored people are so well organized to fight these evils as a class of men ... they have not the wealth. In the territory upon the North Side or in any territory where there are many lawyers and people of some means, if they found a place like that they would never rest until they got it out. They would just keep at it with time and money until they forced it out.

Our observation would indicate that the Negro delinquent has suffered under the handicap of unsatisfactory home conditions. Owing to the general public discrimination, fewer opportunities have been offered him. In addition to adverse conditions in the home, some opportunities in public places have been denied him. Some of the discrimination and ostracism on the part of his associates has been unconscious in many instances. The colored boy has especially few recreational facilities.

It is up to us to give them the best that there is, and we can clean up those districts. I don't believe the question of color is going to enter into the matter at all if we once clean up the districts where they are obliged to live.

North of my church for a block or two along Thirty-first Street at the time I went there was almost exclusively a white residence district. The moral conditions could not have been worse. I had a list in my church study of the houses of prostitution and other lawless agencies gathered by the police and the Committee of Fifteen. I don't know of a district in Chicago where there were more gunmen, more high-class criminals, more high-class prostitutes than there were within three blocks of the First Baptist Church when I came there as pastor.

Speaking from my observation I think that any colored community is liable to be imposed upon by white men who are vicious, and the colored people get no encouragement when they themselves endeavor to rout out that vice. White prostitutes and white gamblers and vicious resorts come into the "Black Belt" because it is black; they operate with more safety than they do in the white belt. That is true of every American city that I know of personally.

Colored people who were up before me in the criminal court were mostly men who did not have steady employment.... My experience was that the environmental conditions out of which the colored defendant arose were an environment of idleness, very largely. I would say, as to the economic factors, that I don't remember a case that I had involving a colored defendant whom I would call prosperous, whereas there were many white defendants who were very prosperous. Most of the colored people tried were in stringent circumstances and poverty.

My experience in the criminal court is that the colored defendant, even in bailable cases, is unable to give bail. He has to stay in jail, and therefore his case is very quickly disposed of by the prosecutor. Defendants locked up are usually tried first. The colored man is more apt to be out of work than the white man, and that is a possible reason for the large number of arrests of Negroes. His sphere is very limited, and if there is any let up in the industry that is involved in that sphere, he is a victim. I have often wondered if you could change the skins of a thousand white men in the city of Chicago and handicap them the way the colored man is handicapped today, how many of those white men in ten years' time would be law-abiding citizens.

This problem as I see it is very complicated. We have to deal first with the matter of economic class which is at the bottom of a good deal of it, then with the matter of race, which is at the bottom of a good deal more of it, although perhaps not as much as class; then there is the matter of politics or a system which has grown up for thirty or forty years back, which makes the class and race relations a good deal more difficult to deal with.

If every man had good housing conditions and a steady job, at a living wage, a good opportunity for education, there would not be very much crime.... Particularly in the case of the colored people, the crime is on the part of the community, on the part of the city that allows bad conditions to exist. Negroes ought to be protected. They don't get protection for the same reason that it is always hard to protect the economically weak against the strong. There is not any use of making a lot of fine phrases about it—that is largely where the trouble lies.