That was when the trouble started. There wasn't any preference shown on the part of the park management to any particular race, but it was the people outside. They absolutely took the stand that as long as they could keep the colored people away they were going to do it. They used every means they could to keep the colored people away from Beutner Playground and Armour Square.
Another instance of whites objecting to the use of recreation facilities for the first time by Negroes was given by the representative of the West Chicago Commission:
Not long ago, two colored men, for the first time in the history of Garfield Park, came out there to play tennis. Immediately somebody in the neighborhood called up the Park Board and complained about Negroes breaking into Garfield Park. We frankly told the people who were complaining that they had equal rights to the use of the facilities at Garfield Park. But it seemed that while we said nothing, the colored gentlemen never appeared again to use the tennis facilities.
The representative of the South Park Commission in commenting on this same point said:
There is a history of development in amicable race relations. Most of the troublous conditions are where there is injected for the first time the question of racial intermingling. Where it is established, where it has gradually grown up, in time there comes an adjustment.
At Armour Square individual Negroes have been accepted as "part of the scheme," according to the representative of the South Park Commission, practically ever since the park was opened. But the director says that it is group action which stirs up trouble:
I think the trouble will adjust itself as the colored people continue to come into the neighborhood, but we are in the situation of having colored people come into the neighborhood where there haven't been any before. I think it will adjust itself in a year or so, and that possibly at that time colored people will begin coming.
The head of the Municipal Bureau thought the difficulties arose, not when Negroes first entered a white neighborhood, but when a balance between the two races was struck, and it was a question which race was going to predominate. "That has been my experience with the municipal playgrounds," he said, citing the case of the Beutner Playground which the Municipal Board decided to turn over to the Negroes.
Where Negroes are accepted and live amicably near white people, or where there has not been enough influx of Negroes to arouse feeling against them the contacts in the playground are usually peaceful. On the other hand, in communities where Negroes are looked on as intruders and objectionable neighbors, and where the white people are antagonistic, a contact between a Negro and white child, which would normally be peaceful, will result in a disturbance and tend to increase existing antagonism. This is the situation at Moseley and Sherwood playgrounds.
At Thirty-eighth Street Beach the prejudice is such as to prevent any Negro from bathing there, although it is as near the center of the main Negro area as the Twenty-sixth Street Beach, to which Negroes are expected to confine themselves. At Armour Square neighborhood sentiment permits a few Negroes to use the park, but trouble starts if new groups come. At Ogden Park a Negro playground director was assaulted by white boys and hit with brass knuckles in 1914, but now, according to a prominent Negro familiar with the situation at the center, there is order and fair treatment both within the park and on the way to it, and the Negroes prefer to travel out there than to go to Washington Park, which is closer at hand, but where they may be attacked if they try to use a boat or may be obliged to wait indefinitely for a tennis court.