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

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

Some southern Negroes apparently came to Chicago with a real grudge against all whites and ready at slight provocation to display their resentment. The minister of one of the Negro churches in Chicago said:

After years of restriction and proscription to which they were subjected in the South, they suddenly find themselves freed in a large measure of these conditions. Their mind harks back to that which they endured at the hands of members of the Aryan race in the South, and they grow resentful, and in the midst of their new environment they vent their spleen. One has but to ride on any of the surface lines running into the section of Chicago largely occupied by my race group to be convinced of the facts mentioned above.

The southern Negro who got into trouble with whites by insisting on his right to a seat sometimes belonged to the class of suspicious and sensitive Negroes, and sometimes he was simply a "greenhorn." The following cases show how "green" the migration Negro could be, and how easy it was for him to make himself disliked and ridiculous. The first case was observed by a Negro man, the second by a Negro woman, both long resident in Chicago:

I boarded a crowded car in the "Loop" going south and was forced to stand near the rear door. There are two lengthwise seats at the rear of the car, one of which will hold three people and one of which will hold two. Two colored women, carelessly dressed and holding greasy paper bundles in their hands, got on the car at Twelfth Street and stood in the back of the car hanging on to straps. They rode this way until Eighteenth Street, when one of them, a large woman, noticing that there were three white people on one of the seats and only two on the other said to her companion, "If three folks can sit on that seat, I ain't going to stand over these white folks, who are just like they are down South, and don't want you to sit down. I'm going to sit down myself." She then inserted herself between the two white women, one of whom was pushed to the floor. The Negro woman was much embarrassed, but I don't think she has yet realized that the seats were of different lengths.

I was on a State Street car when two southern Negro women got on, talking loud, and throwing themselves around loose and careless like. I was sitting on one of the end seats, just big enough for three, and one of the women says to the other, "Here's a seat, here's a seat." "You move over," she said to me. There was fire in their eyes, and I don't like fighting, so I made up my mind that if they started anything I'd get up and give them my seat. Most people would have understood how you felt if you did that, but I am not sure they would have understood. I said to one of them, "There really isn't room on this seat." She gave me a shove, so I said, "But I'll get up and give you my seat." You wouldn't believe what happened then. The conductor came in and said, "You just keep your seat." And a white man, who was sitting in one of the cross-seats, turned around and said, "I'll see that she does."

Soiled and ill-smelling clothes were a large factor in making Negro workingmen objectionable to many whites even of the same working class.

At the time of the migration, in the fall of 1916 and the spring of 1917, the Stock Yards were taking on hundreds of Negro laborers to increase their war-time production, and these new hands, most of them migration Negroes, rode to and from work with white office workers. How the white office workers felt about it is shown by a statement of a white woman clerk in the Stock Yards:

Some of the Negroes on the Thirty-fifth Street car are very rough. Most of them work out at the Stock Yards and the smell of the Yards is very bad. They seem to try to clean up, but the smell is there, especially in cold weather when the cars are closed. I would suggest that they run special cars from the Stock Yards for those people, and that would leave enough cars for us and we wouldn't get the odor either.

This situation was somewhat remedied by the fact that most of the Negro laborers at least changed their clothes before going home, even if they could not entirely rid themselves of the Stock Yards odor; also the hours for Stock Yards employees were so arranged that the office workers came to work later and left later than the white and Negro laborers.

The Negro press of Chicago tried to make the migration Negro realize how the odor attaching to his clothes was affecting public opinion. The Chicago Searchlight of May 22, 1920, had this exhortation by the editor: