School facilities are inadequate, and the buildings are old and overcrowded. Because of this congestion, it becomes necessary for children in the sixth and higher grades to go three miles to a school on Western Avenue. About twenty Negroes attend the high school. In the Esmond Street school approximately 25 per cent of the children are Negroes. The Negroes have repeatedly requested enlarged school facilities. They want a new building conveniently situated for their children.
The white people of Morgan Park are not unfriendly toward their Negro neighbors, though there seems to be a common understanding that Negroes must not live west of Vincennes Road, which bisects the town from northeast to southwest. A Negro once bought a house across the line but found he was so unwelcome that he promptly sold again. More recently the owner of a three-story brick flat building rented to Negroes the twenty flats above his stores. A protest was made by both white and Negro house owners, so that he was forced to eject the Negro tenants.
The demand for homes is shown in the numbers of Negroes who go to Morgan Park on Sundays by automobile, street car, and train. In the spring of 1920 a number of houses were being erected for Negro occupancy in what is known in Morgan Park as "No Man's Land," east of Vincennes Road from 109th to 112th streets. This swampy tract of land was being reclaimed. Streets had been surveyed and laid out, though with little paving. Water, light, and gas were available, and some efforts at drainage had been made, leaving some stagnant pools. Other plans involved the building of eighty five-room bungalows by a Chicago contractor. Six of these were under construction at the time of the investigator's visit, and five had been sold, corner-lot houses at $4,550, houses on inside lots at $4,330.
Morgan Park Negroes appear to be progressing financially. An officer of a local trust and savings bank said that they met their obligations promptly, only occasionally defaulting or suffering foreclosure and then only because of illness, death, or loss of employment. The same officer said savings accounts of Negroes were increasing in number, though small in amount.
Whites and Negroes maintain a friendly attitude. During the 1919 riots a number of conferences took place between Negroes and white people of Morgan Park. The Negroes kept rather close to their own neighborhood, and the only difficulty the police had was in controlling rowdy white boys.
Younger children of the two races play together in the school yards. A teacher in the Esmond Street school declared that no distinction was made between Negroes and whites in that school. It was noted, however, that when games were played, this teacher directed the little Negroes to take little Negro girls as partners. Some prejudice is discernible among whites in the community, but there is an evident desire to be fair and to give the Negroes every reasonable opportunity to exemplify good citizenship so long as they do not move from their own into the white neighborhoods.
Those familiar with the Morgan Park settlement believe that it offers unusual inducements as a home community for Negroes. The contractor who is already building for Negroes there has confidence in the venture. He has dealt before with Negroes and found them satisfactory clients.
2. ROBBINS
This village is the only exclusively Negro community near Chicago with Negroes in all village offices.
Robbins is not attractive physically. It is not on a car line and there is no pretense of paved streets, or even sidewalks. The houses are homemade, in most cases by labor mornings, nights, and holidays, after or before the day's wage-earning. Tar paper, roofing paper, homemade tiles, hardly seem sufficient to shut out the weather; older houses, complete with windows, doors, porches, fences, and gardens, indicate that some day these shelters will become real houses. In 1920 the village took out its incorporation papers, and while there are some who regret this independence and talk of asking Blue Island to annex it, in the main the citizens are proud of their village and certain of its future. There are 380 people all told, men, women, and children, living in something more than seventy houses. It is a long mile down the road to the street car, but daily men and women trudge away to their work, taking with them the feeling of home ownership, of a place for the children to play unmolested, of friends and neighbors.