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

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

ARMOUR SQUARE RECREATION CENTER
Located at Thirty-third Street and Shields Avenue

BEUTNER PLAYGROUND
Located at Thirty-third Street and La Salle Avenue.

At the Diversey Beach in Lincoln Park both races go in the water, but a Lincoln Park representative said that the few Negroes who used this beach kept by themselves on one part of the beach, though there was no official rule compelling them to do this. There have never been any racial disturbances at this beach.

From the Twenty-sixth Street Beach, which is patronized almost entirely by Negroes, down to Thirty-sixth Street, Negroes and whites go into the water in separate groups, except at Twenty-sixth Street, where the few whites who go in mingle amicably with the Negroes. The investigator saw a white couple who had gone out to a raft and could not get back rescued by a Negro life guard. The other bathing-places along the shore for those ten blocks have been allotted by custom exclusively to one race or the other. At Twenty-ninth Street, where the 1919 riot started, a policeman is now stationed, and no trouble has occurred since the riot, though many fights have started which the police have stopped. Gangs of young men come from as far as Halsted Street, according to the policemen, ready to fight at the slightest opportunity. Fights usually occur because of some remark made by one group about a girl in another group. On the whole, however, few Negroes come to Twenty-ninth Street, the policeman said, going instead to Twenty-sixth Street.

At the beaches outside the main Negro area, such as Fifty-first Street and Triangle Park, and Clarendon and Rogers Park beaches to the north, the only Negro patrons are a few young children. The attendants at these beaches believe there would be trouble if adult Negroes started to use them. Negro children have been objected to at Clarendon Beach, where a man asked the director to put a little girl out because "she was a nigger."

Several directors reported that the Negroes did not use the swimming-pools much and segregated themselves when they did go in. The director at Union Park said the Negroes did not use the swimming-pool in proportion to their numbers, and that when they did use it, they came in small groups and confined themselves to a certain part of the pool instead of mingling with the whites. He said that there was nothing in the attitude of the white boys to make them do this, but that it was the "natural impulse of the colored people to do that in the swimming-pool." He thought that many Negroes did not use the pool more because "they are afraid of the water." A Negro playground director testified that he had frequently seen a white boy dive off one side of the pool at Union Park when a Negro boy dived off the other side and hold the Negro boy down until, when he came up, he was gasping for air.

The director of Ogden Park gave an incident that had occurred recently at that park: