Homes of Negroes
In the South, as well as the North, women are at work on the housing question. At the 1912 convention of the National Municipal League, in Richmond, Virginia, it was manifest to the northern delegates that the South and its women are awaking rapidly to the housing needs. Miss Elizabeth Cocke in a talk on housing and morals in Richmond said:
Our local conditions in Richmond have, as yet, nothing which approaches the tenement. There are a few old houses occupied by, possibly, some half-dozen families to the house, but though these show very bad conditions in room overcrowding, there are no conditions of lack of light and air, if the windows are opened to admit ventilation. In one instance I have found a bedroom, occupied presumably by seven people, in which there is no window at all; one door opening upon another room with two windows, and a second door upon the entry on the upper landing.
Among the comparatively small foreign population there is a very great deal of room overcrowding, but the most extensive of these conditions exist among the negroes. These appear to be the most squalid and least progressive, but this I believe to be largely due to the demoralizing effects of bad housing and surroundings which do not tend to any uplift.
Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like dump of rotting rags and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks, have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red-light” district? When a dry-closet blocks the one small window of the kitchen, can lack of decency be called to account? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than cleanliness and health and morality?
It is certainly a fallacy that the poor do not want good housing. In a wonderful address, given last spring at the Child Welfare Conference, in Richmond, a negro speaker said in substance: “We would use the bath tub as frequently and enjoy it as much as our white brother and sister, if we could afford to rent houses which have the bath tub in them. We do not prefer dilapidation and discomfort, nor being forced to live in districts where there is only depravity and low surroundings; but the better ones of us have too much self-respect to force ourselves on our white brothers, if they do not want us living alongside of them.”
All that Miss Cocke said was indorsed by the chairman, John Stewart Bryan, who as publisher of one of the most influential newspapers in the South, The News Leader, is in a position to know the facts. “It is an old story to any engaged in work of this sort,” he declared, “that a person situated as the negro is in Richmond pays more taxes than the richest man in Richmond, because the taxes he pays take such a large part of his income and he gets so little in return. All that Miss Cocke says is true. They are segregated in Jackson ward, and under a new ordinance they are being still further segregated. That is radically wrong, it is economically wrong, and nothing in the world can change it but an awakening of public sentiment, and it ought to be awakened and it will be.”[[32]]
A study of the activities of women and women’s associations along housing reform lines shows that they are beginning to recognize the importance of good homes for our colored citizens. Professor Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, of Chicago University and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, has given this subject special study, and it is to her that we owe the following thoughtful statement of this particular housing question, published in The Survey:
One of the many serious problems that now confront the negro not only in southern communities but also in many a northern city is the difficulty he experiences in finding decent housing accommodations for his family. In the face of increasing manifestations of race prejudice, he has come to acquiesce silently, as various civil rights are withheld from him in the old “free North,” which was once the Mecca of his race. He rarely protests, for example, at being excluded from restaurants and hotels or at being virtually refused entertainment at the theater or the opera. There are three points, however, which he cannot yield and in regard to which he should not be allowed to yield. He must claim a decent home for his family in a respectable neighborhood and at a reasonable rental, an equal chance of employment with the white man, and education for his children. We will consider here only the first of these three demands.
In a recent investigation of general housing conditions in Chicago,[[33]] the problem of the negro was found to be quite different from that of immigrants. With the negro, the housing dilemma was found to be an acute problem not only among the poor, as in the case of the Polish, the Jewish, or the Italian immigrant, but also among the well-to-do. The man who is poor as well as black must face the special evil of dilapidated insanitary dwellings and the lodger evil in its worst form. But for every man who is black, whether rich or poor, there is also the problem of extortionate rents and of dangerous proximity to segregated vice. The negro is not only compelled to live in a segregated black district, but this region of negro homes is almost invariably the one in which vice is tolerated by the police. That is, the segregation of the negro quarter is only a segregation from respectable white people. The disreputable white element is forced upon him. It is probably not too much to say that no colored family can long escape the presence of disreputable or disorderly neighbors. Respectable and well-to-do negroes may by subterfuge succeed in buying property in a decent neighborhood, but they are sure to be followed soon by those disreputable elements which are allowed to exist outside the so-called “levee” district.
In no other part of Chicago, not even in the Ghetto, was there found a whole neighborhood so conspicuously dilapidated as the black belt on the South Side. No other group suffered so much from decaying buildings, leaking roofs, doors without hinges, broken windows, insanitary plumbing, rotting floors, and a general lack of repairs. In no other neighborhood were landlords so obdurate, so unwilling to make necessary improvements or to cancel leases so that tenants might seek better accommodations elsewhere. Of course, to go elsewhere was often impossible because nowhere is the prospective colored tenant or neighbor welcome. In the South Side black belt 74 per cent. of the buildings were in a state of disrepair; in a more fortunate neighborhood, partly colored, only 65 per cent. of the buildings were out of repair, but one-third were absolutely dilapidated.
Not only does the negro suffer from this extreme dilapidation, but he pays a heavy cost in the form of high rent. A careful house to house canvass showed that in the most rundown colored neighborhoods in the city, the rent for an ordinary four-room apartment was much higher than in any other section of the city. In crowded immigrant neighborhoods in different parts of the city, the median rental for the prevailing four-room apartment was between $8 and $8.50; in South Chicago near the steel mills it was between $9 and $9.50; and in the Jewish quarter, between $10 and $10.50 was charged. But in the great black belt of the South Side the sum exacted was between $12 and $12.50. That is, while half of the people in the Bohemian, Polish, and Lithuanian districts were paying less than $8.50, for their four-room apartments; the steel-mill employees less than $9.50, and the Jews in the Ghetto less than $10.50, the negro, in the midst of extreme dilapidation and crowded into the territory adjoining the segregated vice district, pays from $12 to $12.50. This is from $2 to $4 a month more than the immigrant is paying for an apartment of the same size in a better state of repair.
It seemed worth while to collect and to present the facts relating to housing conditions in the negro districts of Chicago because one must hope that they would not be tolerated if the great mass of white people knew of their existence. Most people stand for fair play. The persecutions which the negro endures because of race prejudice undoubtedly express the feeling of but a small minority of his fellow-citizens of the white race. Their continuance must be due to the fact that the great majority are completely ignorant of the heavy burden of injustice that the negro carries. Ignorance is the bulwark of prejudice, and race prejudice is singularly dependent upon an ignorance which is, to be sure, sometimes willful but which more often is unintentional and accidental. It has come about, however, that the small minority who cherish their prejudices have had the power to make life increasingly hard for the black man. Today they not only refuse to sit in the same part of the theater with him and to let him enter a hotel which they patronize, but they also refuse to allow him to live on the same street with them or in the same neighborhood. Even in the North where the city administration does not recognize a black “ghetto” or “pale,” the real estate agents who register and commercialize what they suppose to be a universal race prejudice are able to enforce one in practice. It is out of this minority persecution that the special negro housing problem has developed.
But while it is true that the active persecution of the negro is the work of a small minority, its dangerous results are rendered possible only by the acquiescence of the great majority who want fair play. This prejudice can be made effective only because of the possible use of the city administration, and the knowledge that legal action intended to safeguard the rights of the negro is both precarious and expensive. The police department, however, and the courts of justice are, in theory at least, the agents of the majority. It comes about therefore that while the great body of people desire justice, they not only become parties to gross injustice but must be held responsible for conditions demoralizing to the negro and dangerous to the community as a whole.
Those friends of the negro who have tried to understand the conditions of life as he faces them are very familiar with these facts. But it is hoped that those who have been ignorant of the heavy costs paid in decent family life for the ancient prejudice that persists among us, will refuse to acquiesce in its continuance when the facts are brought home to them.
Among the other women interested in the housing of negro families is Mrs. John D. Hammond, the wife and coworker of the president of Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. Believing that a better housed negro can be better educated, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have worked out a system for negro housing in cities with that end in view. Their plan was recently outlined in The Survey. The Society for the Improvement of Urban Conditions among Negroes, composed of men and women, has a housing bureau in New York which seeks by lectures, by literature, by personal instruction, and by legislation, to promote better housing conditions among the negroes of the city.