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

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

Testimony in regard to adults indicated that the park directors found them quiet and desirable patrons of the parks. Said the director of Seward Park:

One of the most interesting and best-conducted and best-behaved groups I have ever seen is a group of colored people known as the "Jolly Twenty," a dancing organization. They started coming eight years ago and had a system of couple dancing which was marvelous. I have never seen it equaled anywhere. They have been coming every year, once a year, for a dance at Seward, and the "Jolly Twenty" has grown to be about the "Jolly Four Hundred," but the larger the group the better they seem to behave and the better they dance.

The director of Ogden Park told of a Negro club which holds frequent dances at Ogden Park. He said: "About 300 attended the last one. They are the best-behaved group that come. I never have to object to improper dancing or boisterousness, and they always leave on time, have had to object several times to conduct at white dancing parties."

This testimony in regard to Negroes at dances is interesting in view of the situation regarding the recreation facilities at the Municipal Pier. Negro attendance there is about 8 per cent of the total attendance of four million or five million a year, according to the director of the Pier. They are well dressed and well behaved and inclined to segregate themselves. There had never been a single instance of an intoxicated Negro or of one who had made himself in the least objectionable, the director said. The only people whom the pier authorities have had to reprimand for violation of pier rules in regard to cleanliness, monopolizing of furniture, etc., have been whites. Many of the attendants are Negroes, and the band which plays for the dance concessionaire is composed of Negroes. Negroes are welcome everywhere on the Pier, as are all races, according to the director, except in the dance hall, where their appearance is discouraged by the concessionaire. The following method is followed to discourage the appearance of Negroes on the dance floor, according to a white man who had observed it:

Admission to the dance floor is at the rate of five cents per couple, per dance. Each dance lasts about three minutes. If a Negro couple buys a ticket and dances one dance nothing is said. If the couple comes in for another dance, one of the floor managers—employed by the concessionaire—speaks courteously to the couple. He expresses regret that he must mention the matter of their dancing to them, but that they are not dancing properly, and he invites them to come to a corner of the dance floor where he will instruct them in the proper way to dance. This usually occupies the remainder of the particular dance, and results in the Negroes not coming on the floor again. If the couple does reappear, the floor manager again speaks to them saying he is very sorry he has to tell them again that they still are not dancing quite properly and again he invites them to a corner of the dance floor for further instruction. This is the procedure by which the Negroes are embarrassed and discouraged from using the dance floor.

Relations between the children.—Lack of antagonism was reported at a large number of playgrounds. Apparatus was used by both groups without friction, Negro and white children mingled freely in their games and in the swimming-pools, and both Negroes and whites played on baseball and athletic teams. Occasional playground fights had taken place, but usually without any element of racial antipathy. "There might be personal misunderstandings and disagreements between a white and a black just the same as between two whites," said the director of Union Park, "but I wouldn't lay it to race prejudice. They work together and play together and seem to harmonize in most instances." When this director came to Union Park a year before he found a tendency among Negroes and whites to group by themselves, but steps were taken to bring them together in games of various kinds, and toward the end of the season the director felt that they "harmonized better and worked together more cordially than they did before." When the investigator from the Commission visited Union Park Playground, he saw the small children playing together on the same pieces of apparatus—a Negro child on one end of a teeter ladder and a white child on the other.

These children were ten years or under. The director felt that it was not until children reached the age of eleven years or older that they began to feel racial antipathy. In the swimming-pool at this park, which is used by the older children and adults, the Negroes and whites kept separate. There was no trouble between them, but they stayed in separate groups. The director felt that there was little likelihood of trouble ever starting in this park, because "where such nicknames as 'Smoke' are applied to colored boys by white boys, and is given and accepted in a friendly spirit, there is little chance for serious disturbance."

As this playground in Union Park is intended for children under ten, the occasional difficulties between older children might be alleviated if the Hayes Playground, one of those in the system maintained by the Municipal Bureau, were kept open in the summer. The playground at the Hayes School, 80 per cent Negro, was closed and the apparatus dismantled in the summer of 1920 when the investigator visited it. Though it is not a large playground it is the one the older Negro children are accustomed to use during the school year, and they are doubtless reluctant to go in the summer to other school playgrounds which they do not ordinarily use.

At Seward Park the Negroes use the facilities freely and play with the white children on the apparatus and in the ball field. The only difficulty reported here was in connection with a wrestling tournament. The director described it as follows:

Last season we had a wrestling championship tournament. There were some colored groups who had wrestled at Seward who were eligible for entrance into this tournament, and when the night came for weighing in, the director for one of the other parks said, "What are these colored people doing here?" "They are weighing in." I said. "They will not wrestle with my group," he said. "Very well, then, I guess your groups will not be in it," I said.