Another source of racial disorder is the lack of co-ordination between park and city police. The park police stop a fight between a white child and a Negro child and send them from the park. Outside the park gates the children start fighting again, and the park police have no power to interfere. The spectators may then get into the fight, dividing along racial lines, and before the city police can be summoned a race riot may be well under way. Either city police should be stationed directly outside every park, ready to co-operate with the park police, or else the jurisdiction of the park police should be extended to include the area immediately surrounding the park.
The most important remedies suggested to the Commission for the betterment of relations between Negroes and whites at the various places of recreation were: (1) additional facilities in Negro areas, particularly recreation centers which can be used by adults; (2) an awakened public opinion which will refuse longer to tolerate the hoodlum and will insist that the courts properly punish such offenders; (3) selection of directors for parks in neighborhoods where there is a critical situation who will have a sympathetic understanding of the problem and will not tolerate actions by park police officers and other subordinate officials tending to discourage Negro attendance; and (4) efforts by such directors to repress and remove any racial antagonism that may arise in the neighborhood about the park.
D. CONTACTS IN TRANSPORTATION
I. INTRODUCTION
Volume of traffic.—The number of passengers carried in 1916 in a twenty-four-hour day by the Chicago surface lines was 3,500,000 and by the elevated railway lines 560,000, according to a tabulation made by the Chicago Traction and Subway Commission in 1916. With the city's growth in population the traffic in 1920 doubtless showed an even larger volume. This traffic is distributed over approximately 1,050 miles of surface and 142 miles of elevated track. It is most congested in the "Loop" area of the downtown business section, which is a transfer center for the three sides of the city, North, South, and West; and of course it is heaviest at the hours when people go to and from work.
Concentration of Negro traffic.—Negroes constitute 4 per cent of the city's population, according to the federal census for 1920, and presumably about that percentage of the city's street-car traffic. The Negro traffic, however, instead of being scattered all over the city, is mainly concentrated upon twelve lines which traverse the Negro residence areas and connect them with the manufacturing districts where Negroes are largely employed. These twelve lines, which are shown on the two transportation diagrams [facing page 300], cover 11 per cent of the total mileage of the surface and elevated lines. Because of this concentration, however, the proportion of Negroes to whites on these twelve lines is much higher than 4 per cent, and on such lines as that on State Street, which runs along the principal business street of the main South Side Negro residence area, it often happens that the majority of the passengers are Negroes. In addition to these twelve lines of heaviest Negro traffic, there are others traversing less densely populated parts of Negro residence areas. In varying degrees contacts of Negroes and whites may be found on other lines which serve the small proportion of the Negro population scattered throughout the city.
The main area of Negro residence, on the South Side, where about 90 per cent of the Negroes in Chicago live, is traversed by the State Street, Indiana Avenue, Cottage Grove Avenue, Stony Island Avenue, and the South Side elevated lines, running north and south, and by eleven cross-town lines, running east and west, beginning with the Twenty-second Street line at the north and ending with the Seventy-first Street line at the south. From six to nine o'clock in the morning, and from four to six o'clock in the afternoon, there is a heavy Negro traffic on the lines going north to the "Loop," on the Cottage Grove Avenue line going south to the South Chicago manufacturing district, and on the Thirty-fifth Street and Forty-seventh Street lines and the elevated branch line at Fortieth Street going west to the Stock Yards. To reach the Stock Yards, Negro laborers must ride through a territory between Wentworth Avenue and Halsted Street in which, as shown in the sections of the report dealing with housing and with racial clashes, hostility toward Negroes has often been displayed. This Negro traffic west of Wentworth Avenue is, therefore, chiefly confined to a few hours in the morning and the afternoon.
The West Side Negro residence area is connected with the "Loop" by the Madison Street and Lake Street surface lines, and the elevated line on Lake Street, and with the Stock Yards by the Halsted Street and Ashland Avenue lines.
The North Side Negro residence area is connected with the "Loop" by the lines on State and Clark streets and by the Northwestern elevated lines. Contacts on these lines, however, are not as important as on the lines serving the South and West Side areas, because the number of Negroes involved is only about 1,500, or less than 2 per cent of the Negro population.
Contacts and racial attitudes.—As in other northern cities, there is no "Jim Crow" separation of the races on street cars in Chicago. The contacts of Negroes and whites on the street cars never provoked any considerable discussion until the period of Negro migration from the South, when occasional stories of clashes began to be circulated, but only one such incident was reported in the newspapers. Even since the migration began there have been few complaints based upon racial friction in transportation contacts.