J. G. hails from West Virginia. He has been in town for two days and has no room as yet. The lodging places he went to asked seventy-five cents a night for a dirty bed. He stayed up both nights, and expects to leave the city as soon as he can.
The Case family have eight children. The oldest is a girl of seventeen years of age who works in a hotel. The mother works every day in the week; she leaves home at seven in the morning and returns at five o’clock in the afternoon. A girl of fifteen takes care of the children in the meantime.
Mr. P. Roberts was a prosperous Negro in Florida. He was an experienced concrete maker, earning according to his statement more than five and six dollars a day at home, and owning property in the South. When the industrial boom began he thought that the wages in his line were much higher here than in his own home town, and that it would pay him to come North. He came to Pittsburgh together with his wife, five children and an old invalid mother who was confined to bed. When first visited, Mr. Roberts occupied two small rooms, each having one window, in a rooming house where there were about twenty-five male roomers. This man could get no work here in his own trade, and was trying to save up enough money from his $3.00 to $3.60 a day to go back to Florida. When Roberts was visited again about six weeks after the first visit, his old mother had already passed away, his wife had died of pneumonia, while his oldest girl of sixteen who had been taking care of the four little tots was sick in bed, and the children were playing on the streets. Roberts was still trying to save from his $3.60 a day sufficient money to carry him back to Florida, which he still considers his home, as he owns property there.
These amazing instances of individual maladjustments are bound to arise in any group which goes through such a sudden and abnormal transformation. But they are even more frequent in the race which is still primitive and child-like in many ways, with no one to direct, guide and protect them.
But the significance and danger of these wrongs are even of greater importance for the community as a whole, than for the few individuals affected. The fact cannot be over-emphasized that the community ultimately pays the price for its stupidity. Indifference to this problem at present when it still can be coped with and adjusted will result in an uncontrollable situation later. We have seen above some of the costly results of our housing and wage conditions. We have also learned in this war that we can no longer afford to breed and foment discontent and antagonism among our own people. We must not only see that the strangers among us are adjusted, but that they also do not become a menace to the well-being of the community.
It is not sufficient that we bring these people here, give them a “bunk-house” or a basement to sleep in, and a job in our mills for twelve hours a day. Once these people are in our midst they become a part of ourselves, and if we desire them to work in harmony with our own interests and not become anti-social malcontents we must go further than that. We must see that they become part and parcel of our community, that they are educated and made familiar with the problems that we are facing locally. The man who is here for several days and stays up all night because he can find no place to sleep cannot be expected to remain for long a social being. Pittsburgh’s progress will be greatly handicapped if a certain element of our community has to take advantage of the saloon and vice resorts for relaxation. Neither can we afford to let a considerable part of our voting population remain, because of lack of intelligence, the prey and spoil of politicians who may jeopardize the whole life of the city for their own selfish interest. We cannot permit sickness and high mortality rates among the dark-skinned people. One of our big steel mills had to have its whole office and plant forces vaccinated, and was even in danger of being quarantined, when a number of Negroes working in the plant scattered all over the city after a case of smallpox was discovered in the rooming house where these men stopped. The Department of Health had a big task hunting these men, and the danger to which the whole city population was exposed was obvious. No more can we afford to let the Negroes become the victims of all sorts of anti-social elements and feel complacent after we send them for a period of time to the jail or workhouse. They are a heavy burden upon the taxpayer while they are in these Institutions and often become even a greater menace when they are released. Our utmost attention is therefore essential to meet the maladjustments before they have become acute; and we do not base this claim upon sentimental grounds but upon the benefits of economic and social far-sightedness.
Many Negroes in the North seem to understand the situation, and are striving to do their best to help adjust conditions. Some of the Negro churches in this city for instance tried to ameliorate the housing conditions by converting their churches into lodging places for the newcomers until rooms could be found for them. Besides the Provident Rescue Mission on Fullerton Street, which accommodated thirty to forty men at a time during the entire winter, at least one other church converted the entire building into quarters for migrant families. The latter church accommodated a number of families until the committee in charge could secure homes for the newcomers. But the responsibility of the white people is just as great, and it is indeed in very opportune time that a prophetic warning is sounded by a colored writer in a Cleveland paper as follows:
“Let them alone—permit them to grope blindly through the mazes of startling new environments, and in a few years a social problem will be created that will require a half century and millions of dollars to solve.”
“Let them alone now, permit and enforce them to live in unsanitary districts and homes, relieved of Christian and moral influence, and what is perhaps a 20,000 responsibility today, will become a 50,000 heavy, crime-breeding burden tomorrow.”
“Let them alone today, permit them to become the flotsam and jetsam of neglect, or pernicious discrimination—such as they were in the South—and tomorrow, having inhaled a bit of Northern freedom, they may become a dark, sinister shadow falling athwart the white man’s door.”