There are four settlements in Chicago in or near the neighborhoods of colored people. The pioneer was the Frederick Douglas Center on the South Side of Chicago, founded to promote a better understanding between white and colored people and to help remove the arbitrary disabilities from which the latter suffer in their civil, political and industrial life. The founder and head resident, who had for years been troubled by the increasing race antagonism against the colored people, believes that much can be accomplished by a frank discussion of the situation between the two races if it be carried on with justice and good will; cases of unusual discrimination are often arbitrated and adjusted.

The Wendell Phillips settlement was also organized by a board of white and colored people who were concerned over the conditions obtaining in the colored district on the West Side of the city. Two young colored women, graduates of Fiske University, are in charge and have developed an excellent system of clubs and classes. Both of these settlements own their own property.

The Negro Fellowship League was founded as an outgrowth of the discussion following the Springfield riots, when it was said that the difficulty arose from idle young men out of work, maintains a reading room, a lodging house, and an employment agency on State street in the midst of the “Black Belt.” The League performs many offices for the colored men who have newly arrived in Chicago similar to those of the League for the Protection of Immigrants; in fact, the needs of the two classes of people are similar in many respects, implying lack of adjustment rather than lack of ability.

The Enterprise Institute on State street has classes in various lines, at present numbering 150 pupils. There are in Chicago an entire group of institutions which have arisen as colored people were discriminated against in existing institutions, such as the Home for the Widows of Colored Soldiers and the Home for the Aged, all supported by associations of colored women.

A day nursery for colored children was organized a year ago because several day nurseries refused to receive colored children on the ground that “the other people objected to them.” There are likewise five homes for colored dependent children; two were the outgrowths of apparent discrimination against colored children in two state industrial schools receiving public funds, although in the case of the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, situated at Park Ridge, Illinois, the Institution is responsible for the branch maintained in Chicago for colored girls and defrays all expenses. The board managers believe that this segregation is equally valuable to both sets of children. The similar school for boys at Glenwood, Illinois, does not maintain a separate branch, but in various ways avoids taking colored boys into the school. At the time of the investigation, the Glenwood School contained 500 white boys and fifteen colored boys, a number disproportionate to the cases of colored boys brought into the Juvenile Court. It is becoming a custom, on the part of many places, to refuse colored children, with the cryptic utterance, “We have no room.”

In order to provide for dependent and delinquent colored children, a colored workman, previously a probation officer, established the Louise Juvenile Home, which cares for twenty dependent boys. The Eldridge Home and the Marcy Home each provides for smaller children. The Amanda Smith Home was founded by an ex-slave with a remarkable gift for public speaking and great religious devotion. She spent twelve years in China, Japan and Africa under the auspices of the English Missionary and Temperance Society. Returning home to Chicago in 1900, she invested the savings of her lifetime, ten thousand dollars, in the Home, which is chartered under the provision of the industrial school act. The Home cares for fifty children, but since Mrs. Smith left, on account of ill health, it has been greatly crippled for lack of funds. All of these homes for colored children are supported wholly by colored people. The Illinois Technical School for colored girls is maintained in Chicago by the Catholic Church; there are fifty-one girls in the school, ranging from four to sixteen years of age and receiving most excellent care. In spite of these various efforts, the care for dependent and semi-delinquent colored children is totally inadequate, a situation which is the more remarkable as the public records all give a high percentage of negro criminals; the police department gives 7.7 per cent; the Juvenile Court 6.5 per cent; the county jail 10 per cent.

Those familiar with the police and the courts believe that negroes are often arrested on excuses too flimsy to hold a white man; that any negro who happens to be near the scene of a crime or disorder is promptly arrested and often convicted on evidence upon which a white man would be discharged. The Juvenile Protective Association has on record cases in which negroes have been arrested without sufficient cause and convicted on inadequate evidence, and it is well known that a certain type of policeman, juryman, and prosecuting attorney have apparently no scruples in sending “a nigger up the road” on mere suspicion.

To take one record from the files of the Association, the case of George W., a colored boy, nineteen years old, who was born in Chicago and had attended the public schools through one year at the high school. He lived with his mother and had worked steadily for three years as a porter in a large grocery store, until August 22, 1912, when he was arrested on the charge of rape. On the late afternoon of that day an old woman of eighty-three was assaulted by a negro and was saved from the horrible attack only by the timely arrival of her daughter, who so frightened the assailant that he jumped out of a window. Two days later George was arrested, charged with the crime. At the police station he was not allowed to sleep; was beaten, cuffed and kicked, and finally, battered and frightened, he confessed that he had committed the crime. When he appeared in court, his lawyer advised him to plead guilty, although the boy explained that he had not committed the crime and had confessed simply because he was forced to do so. The evidence against him was so flimsy that the judge referred to it in his instructions to the jury. The State’s Attorney had failed to establish the ownership of the cap dropped by the fleeing assailant and the time of the attempted act was changed during the testimony. Though the description given by the people who saw the colored man running away did not agree with George’s appearance, nevertheless the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced the boy to fourteen years in the penitentiary. When one of the men who had seen the guilty man running away from the old woman’s house was asked why he did not make his testimony more explicit, he replied, “Oh, well, he’s only a nigger anyway.” The case was brought to the Juvenile Protective Association by the employer of George W., who, convinced of the boy’s good character, felt that he had not had a fair trial. The Association found that the boy could absolutely prove an alibi at the time of the crime and is making an effort to get him out of the penitentiary.

Occasionally it happens that very little time is given to a case where a negro is concerned.

Some time ago a colored man was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced by the judge to imprisonment for life in the penitentiary. It took just sixteen minutes from the time the negro was brought into the court to the time he left it, to have his case brought up, to plead guilty and to have a sentence of lifelong imprisonment pronounced. It surely seems as if such a serious crime as the taking of life and the commitment of a man to prison for as long as he lives, should at least require less haste and more mature deliberation.

The reasons given by the leading colored men of Chicago for the large amount of crime among their people are curiously confirmed by the results of this investigation. They contend that first, the negroes in Chicago are so limited in the choice of employment that they under-bid each other and are forced to work for the smallest wages. This obliges the wife and mother to go out to work and the consequent neglect of the children leads to truancy, incorrigibility and crime. Second, that the colored people of Chicago are obliged to pay such a high rental that a large number of families are forced to take in lodgers, which results in much immorality and indecency among colored people who would otherwise remain respectable. Third, that the colored people are forced to make their homes in and near the openly immoral districts of the city so that the only white people many colored children ever see are those frequenting the vice district. Fourth, the disproportionate number of negro criminals is due to the fact that their desire for the friendship and sympathy of the white people is often exploited by white criminals who wish to secure shelter from the police. Some obscure colored family, happy to render a service to a white man, takes him in sometimes for weeks or months, and he naturally influences the colored men with whom he associates.

As remedies against the unjust discrimination against the colored man suspected of crime, a leading attorney of the race in Chicago suggests: (a) Generalizing against the negro should cease; the fact that one negro is bad should not fix criminality upon the race. The race should be judged by its best as well as by its worst types. (b) The public press never associates the nationality of a criminal so markedly in its account of crime as in the case of a negro. This exception is most unjust and harmful and should not obtain. (c) The negro should not be made the universal “scapegoat.” When a crime is committed, the slightest pretext starts the rumor of a “negro suspect” and flaming headlines prejudice the public mind long after the white criminal is found.

The colored man complains of race prejudice exhibited first in the readiness to condemn the untried negro as a criminal; second, in the refusal to give him employment fitted to his skill and capacity; third, in crowding the colored population into the most undesirable houses in the city. He does not resent social ostracism, but he does make a vigorous demand for his civil and economic rights.

In order to test the many times repeated statement that colored people are discriminated against at public cafes, a young colored woman, at the request of the investigators, visited sixteen of the leading confectioners of Chicago in the most crowded portion of the city, asking to be served with a cup of hot chocolate. In every place she was served, always by white men or women, and the white patrons seated at adjoining tables paid no attention to her presence. At one place, however, she was obliged to wait for a long time, but was finally served without remark. At another place, after waiting for twenty minutes, she was asked to take a seat at the counter and told that white people would not sit at the same table with her. At two other places she fancied that she was made fun of by the waiters, but in none of the places did she encounter actual rudeness. Possibly this treatment would not have been accorded to her at the hotels. Quite recently the County Federation of women’s clubs arranged a luncheon at one of the leading hotels of the city. When the proprietor objected to the presence of the colored delegates, the officers of the federation gave up the luncheon rather than to countenance such discrimination, although the objection was made so late that a committee was obliged to stand at the door of the hotel to tell the members that the luncheon had been given up and the program postponed. Naturally some of the delegates objected, but the large majority approved the action of the officers in spite of the great inconvenience involved.

All colored people are especially fond of music, but almost the only outlet the young people find for their musical facility is in vaudeville shows, amusement parks and inferior types of theaters. That which should be a great source of inspiration tends to pull them down, as their love of pleasure, lacking innocent expression, draws them toward the vice district, where alone the color line disappears.

An effort was recently made by some colored people on the South Side to start a model dance hall. The white people of the vicinity, assuming that it would be an objectionable place, successfully opposed it as a public nuisance and this effort toward better recreation facilities had to be abandoned.

Even the waters of Lake Michigan are not available for colored children. They are not welcomed by the white children at the bathing beaches and late last summer one little colored boy who attempted to bathe at the Thirty-ninth street beach was mobbed and treated so roughly that the police were obliged to send in a riot call.

This investigation would certainly explain the presence of so large a proportion of colored boys in the county jail on the following grounds: First, the colored children are forced to live in the very worst neighborhoods in Chicago and even there the colored families are charged such high rents that the house is filled with “floaters” of a very undesirable class, so that the children witness all kinds of offenses against decency within the house as well as on the streets.

Second, the fathers of the families, because they are so circumscribed in their lines of occupation, work for very small wages, with the inevitable outcome that the mothers go out to work and neglect their children. As a result, the colored children are underfed, irregular in school attendance, make slow progress in their studies and drop out of school at the earliest possible moment.

Third, there are not enough places in Chicago where negro children may find wholesome amusement. Of the fifteen small parks and playgrounds with field houses, only two are really utilized by colored children.

They avoid the others because of friction and difficulty which they constantly encountered with the white children. The commercial amusements found in the neighborhoods of colored people are of the lowest type of pool rooms and saloons, which are artificially numerous because so many young colored men find their first employment in these two occupations and with their experience and very little capital are able to open places for themselves.

Perhaps the greatest factor of all is the difficulty which all colored people have in finding employment; and after an ambitious boy has been refused employment again and again in the larger mercantile and industrial establishments and comes to the conclusion that there is no use in trying to get a decent job, he is in a very dangerous state of mind. Idle and discouraged, his neighborhood environments vicious, such a boy quickly shows the first symptoms of delinquency and the remedial agencies which should be prompt in his case are the very weakest at this point. Added to this is the conviction held by many colored boys and young men that “the police have it in for them and do not accord them fair treatment.”

In suggesting remedies for this state of affairs, the broken family life, the surrounding of a vicious neighborhood, the dearth of adequate employment, the lack of preventive institutional care and proper recreation for negro youth, the Juvenile Protection Association finds itself confronted with the situation stated at the beginning of the investigation, that the life of the colored boy and girl is so circumscribed on every hand by race limitations that they can be helped only insofar as the entire colored reputation in Chicago is understood and fairly treated.

For many years Chicago, keeping to the tradition of its early history, had the reputation among colored people of according them fair treatment. Even now it is free from the outward signs of “segregation,” but unless the city realizes more fully than it does at present the great injustice which discrimination against any class of citizens entails, we shall suffer for our indifference by an ever increasing number of idle and criminal youth, which must eventually vitiate both the black and white citizenship of Chicago.

Press of Rogers & Hall Co., Chicago