Few white people realized how uncertain the southern Negro felt about making use of his new privilege of sitting anywhere in the car, instead of being "Jim Crowed." One Negro woman who came to the city during the migration said, when she was asked about her first impression of Chicago: "When I got here and got on the street cars and saw colored people sitting by white people, I just held my breath, for I thought any minute they would start something. Then I saw nobody noticed it, and I just thought this is a real place for Negroes." There were exceptional cases in which southern Negroes walked miles, rather than take a car.
It may seem strange in view of such uncertainty of mind and timidity that the most noticeable point of behavior of the southern Negro was loud talking, joking, and laughter. The South Side Elevated Company, replying to the Commission's inquiries, said: "These colored people are of a happy-go-lucky type and are often noisy, especially when two or more acquaintances meet on the trains or station platforms or crossing from one side of the station to the other. They laugh and talk a good deal and seem to be happy and care-free."
Although some of this boisterousness was no doubt due to a care-free spirit and a broad good humor, some of it had quite a different source. Many a southern Negro thinks that the whites like him to be "typical," and that they will tolerate him as long as his dialect, his wit, and his manner are amusing enough. A Negro newspaper of Chicago took the southern Negroes to task for using this safety device in Chicago.
Many whites, clerical workers, shoppers, and others of a non-laboring type, have expressed objections to what they term a tendency of Negroes to "sit all over the cars," meaning to sit anywhere in the car. This was most conspicuous when whites had to ride in the morning on a car which had come from one of the Negro residence areas and was already filled with Negroes, or when Negroes and whites were boarding a comparatively empty car near one of the big industrial plants in the afternoon. The employment manager of the Corn Products Company plant at Argo reported a complaint about this tendency made to him by one of the girls in the office:
An office girl told me she had trouble getting a seat on the cars. She was not able to get a seat by herself and did not want to sit next to a Negro. She said that Negroes would rush in and get all the seats by the windows. She thought they did it more to tease the office help than anything else. This girl was undoubtedly prejudiced. That was one of her arguments to explain why she had difficulty in getting to work in the morning. She is a St. Louis girl of Flemish extraction.
Many of the southern Negroes were found to be very hesitant about taking seats next to whites. The southern tradition was so ingrained in them that they tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. On the other hand, some, with the sudden removal of the restraints of the South, used their new freedom without thought of the effect of their behavior on Chicago whites and Negroes.
The attitude of migration Negroes was sometimes expressed to the Commission's investigators. For example:
You can spend your money as you please, live better and get more enjoyment out of it—I mean go where you please, without being Jim-Crowed.
There's no lynching or Jim Crow. You can vote, you receive better treatment and more money for your work.
The freedom of speech and action. You can live without fear and there's no Jim Crow.