One day I noticed three small colored girls sitting among the others in the "swimming line" waiting for the doors to open. A few minutes afterward they were at the end of the line. I tried to find out the reason but could discover nothing either from the colored girls or the others. I saw that they went back to the place in the line they had before and went to my office. Some minutes later I looked out and saw that while the swimming had begun, these three had not gone in but were sitting there watching the rest. I was unable to discover why they didn't go in—they said merely that they "didn't want to." Whether there was some threat or whether the girls were naturally timid about going into the pool I do not know.
The representative of the South Park Commission said that in the South Park district the parents were opposed to race contacts in swimming- and wading-pools. "Not 10 per cent of the families will allow contact with Negroes in the pools," he said.
None of the three natatoriums maintained by the Municipal Bureau is patronized by Negroes, with the exception of the Washington Heights pool which is used by a few Negro children in the summer. This pool is near a Negro district, but the other two are remote from the Negro areas.
A distinction was made by several directors between formal and informal activities at playgrounds and recreation centers. It was their theory that Negroes and whites mingled successfully in informal activities, but not in formal ones. "There is a difference in the informal use by children of a playground and the use of a recreation building where there are clubs and dances and classes and things of that sort," said the director of Armour Square. "Children and adults come in individually to use the library and other facilities, but there are no applications from organized groups of Negroes for any of the facilities at Armour Square." The real distinction in most cases is probably not between formal and informal use but between use by children and use by adults, as the formal activities are those in which older children and adults engage, as was pointed out by the representative of the West Chicago Commission.
Clashes.—Clashes between Negroes and whites at various places of recreation are reported as far back as 1913. These clashes in the main have been initiated by gangs of white boys. In 1913, for example, the secretary of boys' work at the Wabash Avenue Y.M.C.A. (for Negroes) conducted a party of nineteen Negro boys from the Douglass Center Boys' Club to Armour Square. They had no difficulty in entering the park and carrying out their program of athletics. The party then took shower baths in the field house. The Y.M.C.A. secretary had noticed the increasing crowds of white boys near-by but had no misgivings until the party left the park. Then they were assailed with sandbags, tripped, walked over, and some of them badly bruised. They were obliged to take refuge in neighboring saloons and houses in Thirty-third Street west of Shields Avenue. For fully half an hour their way home was blocked, until a detachment of city police, called by the park police, scattered the white gang.
That same year the Y.M.C.A. secretary had found it impossible to proceed east through Thirty-first Street to the lake with groups of Negro boys. When this was tried they inevitably met gangs of white boys, and fights ensued with any missiles procurable. Attempts to overcome this antagonism by continuing to demonstrate that the Negro boys had a right to use these streets were unavailing for the next two years.
In 1915 similar conflicts occurred. That winter Father Bishop, of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, took a group of the Negro Y.M.C.A. boys to Armour Square to play basket-ball. The party, including Father Bishop, was beaten up by white boys, their sweaters were taken from them, and they were otherwise maltreated. The Y.M.C.A. staff then decided not to attempt to use the park or field house during the evenings.
The same year an attempt was made to take seventy-five of these boys through the Stock Yards. They had received tickets of admission to the annual stock show, in the pavilion at "the Yards." In spite of the four adult leaders, several of the boys were struck by sticks and other missiles while passing from one section of the show to another. The gang of white boys continually increased in numbers, and the situation by three o'clock, two hours after the Negroes had entered, began to look desperate. Police assistance was required to get the Negro boys safely out of the building and into street cars. No effort was made to restrain the white gangsters, who were allowed to range through the building at will.
An altercation between white and Negro boys in Washington Park is on record as early as the summer of 1913. These boys were sixteen or seventeen years of age. During the spring and summer of 1919, numerous outbreaks occurred because of the use of the baseball diamonds in Washington Park by Negro players. White gangs from the neighborhood of Fifty-ninth Street and Wentworth Avenue, not far from the park, also came there to play baseball, among them some of "Ragen's Colts."[44] Gang fights frequently followed the games. Park policemen usually succeeded in scattering the combatants. The same season gangs of white boys from sixteen to twenty years of age frequently annoyed Negro couples on the benches of this park. When the Negroes showed fight, minor clashes often resulted.
In Ogden Park, as far back as 1914, there were similar instances of race antipathy, expressed by hoodlums who were more or less organized. A Negro playground director said that if Negro boys attended band concerts in that park, white gangs would wait for them outside the park, and the Negroes were slugged. The white gangs also tried to keep Negro boys from using the shower baths at the park. This director told how a party of Negroes whom he had taken there was surrounded by white gangsters when they emerged from the shower house. "A boy reached around and caught me and pulled me up close to the other fellow," he said. "I dug down and got out. Of course they rushed for me. In the rush the other colored lads got out. Brass knuckles were used on me. When I looked up they said, 'My God, you have hit L—; you have hit the wrong fellow.'" The director declares that the man who hit him with the brass knuckles was discharged by the court with a reprimand.