Athletic teams.—In the field of athletics there seems to be no feeling between the white and Negro members of a school team, but the Negro members are sometimes roughly handled when the team plays other schools. "The basketball team is half and half," said the principal of Wendell Phillips. He reported some friction in previous years but said that "this year it is not shown at all." "They played a strenuous game with Englewood last week. A colored boy was roughly treated by the other team. Our white boys were ready to fight the whole Englewood team."
The principal of Hyde Park High School also said that there was no feeling in his school against Negro members of athletic teams, and that he did not know of a single instance in which a Negro boy was kept off an athletic team if he was the best for the place.
Two Seniors in a high school mainly white (Tilden) thus described the way they handled the Negro members of a visiting basket-ball team:
On the way over here fellows on the outside bawled them out, but our fellows sure got them on the way home. There were three black fellows on the team and those three got just about laid out. Our team wouldn't play them, so there was a great old row. Then, when they went home some of our boys were waiting for them to come out of the building to give them a chase. The coons were afraid to come out, so policemen had to be called to take them to the car line. The white fellows weren't hurt any, but the coons got some bricks.
Transfers between high schools.—Requests for transfers from Wendell Phillips to Englewood and Hyde Park schools had been made by both white and Negro children, according to the principals of the latter schools. The permits of the Negro children had frequently been revoked after they had been admitted to classes, and the children returned to Wendell Phillips. A teacher at Wendell Phillips pointed out the injustice of transferring a child in the middle of a term. After a child has been admitted to classes he should be permitted to remain through the semester, she believed, for otherwise a full term's work was lost because the courses in the schools were different. "All this transferring is nonsense, anyway," she said. "Children should be made to go to school in the district where they live and that would end the trouble."
This teacher told of an incident at Tilden School when a group of Negro boys registered for entrance:
About sixty colored boys entered Tilden High School either for the regular high-school course or prevocational work and were thrown out by the Tilden boys. They made it so hot for the colored boys that the sixty had to withdraw. Some came back here; others dropped out of school entirely. It's pretty bad when one set of boys can put out another set and nothing is done to punish one and call back the other group.
Two boys at Tilden who took part in this affair gave this version of the incident:
About thirty colored boys registered at Tilden last fall, but we cleaned up on them the first couple of days and they never showed up again. We didn't give them any peace in the locker room, basement, at noon hours, or between classes—told them to keep out of our way or we'd see they got out. The fellows who were in school before we didn't tackle—they know where they belong. There's one colored fellow in our class everybody likes. He's a smart nice fellow to talk to, and he doesn't stick around when you don't want him. He didn't say anything when we made the new coons step around, but I guess he didn't like it very well.
It was this same group of boys who objected to playing a visiting basketball team with three Negroes on it and "just about laid them out."