The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

The type of recreation facility most commonly found in the Negro areas is the playground. The lack of recreation centers within the Negro areas is conspicuous, as is also the fact that six of the seven recreation centers accessible to Negroes are not used as much as 10 per cent by them. The playground is intended for the use of young children and has practically nothing to attract older children and adults, except sometimes a baseball or athletic field. Indoor facilities are not a part of the equipment of a playground, so that the average maintenance cost of a playground is not more than $2,000 to $5,000 a year.[41]

RECREATION FACILITIES

The recreation center is the most unusual and notable feature of Chicago's recreation system but one from which the Negro gets little benefit. It is a complete community center, with both indoor and outdoor facilities. It represents an investment of from $200,000 to $800,000, according to the amount of ground, the location, and the extent of its facilities. The yearly expenditure necessary to maintain such a recreation center where older children and adults can hold meetings, dances, and entertainments, and where there are concerts, indoor games, swimming-pools, showers, etc., is shown by the reports of the park boards to be from $30,000 to $50,000. Though the argument that wholesome recreation makes for better citizenship applies to Negroes as well as to whites, no recreation center has been located within the Negro areas and only seven near them.[42]

The director of Armour Square, a recreation center which is just beyond the edge of the main Negro area, but which the Negroes do not feel free to use for reasons discussed later, was asked what places of recreation for adult Negroes existed in that neighborhood. She instanced a social settlement that had been out of existence for more than six years, an infant-welfare station and a commercial amusement park known to be in bad repute.

Although in recent years the Negro population has been increasing in density in the neighborhood directly east of Wentworth Avenue along which Hardin, Armour, and Fuller recreation centers are located, this has not increased the use of these centers by Negroes. It has tended, rather, to increase the antagonism of the whites in the vicinity to the use of the centers by Negroes. In this neighborhood the hostility toward Negroes of whites, especially gangs of hoodlums, is shown by the many attacks upon Negroes in this area as discussed in the sections on the "Riot of 1919" and "Antecedent Clashes."

Several representatives of the park boards strongly deprecated the lack of recreation centers within the Negro area and said that such facilities should be provided. The South Park representative recommended the area east of Wentworth Avenue between Thirtieth and Forty-seventh streets as one needing additional facilities. The West Park representative said: "A complete all-year-round recreation center for the colored people should be established at Ashland and Lake streets. We need greater facilities, or equal facilities, for the colored people. There isn't any place on the West Side that I know of, but yet we have many of these complete recreation centers there for the whites." Although the Negroes on the West Side had never asked for additional facilities, the white people in that neighborhood had frequently asked the West Park Commission to provide greater facilities for the Negroes. The Negroes in the district were not organized, according to the West Park official, but the white people realized that something ought to be done for the Negroes and made the request.

The director of Seward Park said the maintenance cost was the chief obstacle to additional recreational facilities. "The law permits acquisition of property for small parks by request of citizens and bond issues for the purchase of the property and its development," he said. "When it comes to maintenance the question of taxes comes in, and unless people are willing to be taxed in excess of what they are taxed now, there won't be any possibility of maintaining more parks."

Though there are three public bathing-beaches near the main Negro area, the whites seem to expect Negroes to confine themselves to the Twenty-sixth Street Beach. It is quite limited and unattractive in approach and surroundings. The approach is over a rough road through a much-neglected neighborhood, and then up a long flight of stairs to a four-foot viaduct over the railroad tracks, and a roundhouse and switch yards are near by. The beach is a strip of sand about fifty feet wide and a short block in length; it narrows at one end to the tracks and at the other end is walled by a high embankment. While it offers a chance to get into the lake, the atmosphere of wholesome, recreative outdoor life is entirely lacking.