Going south on a State Street car to Fifty-third Street, I noticed a man in the aisle staring at me. He kept moving down nearer and nearer to my seat and sat down in front of me. He handed me a note written on a scrap of newspaper. I opened it because I was curious to know what his motive was. He was a young man, in his twenties, and well dressed. He had written down his name and telephone number and the words: "Call me for a date."
I remember one man especially, because I used to ride downtown on the same car he took every morning. The first time I ever saw him, he stared at me a great deal and when I got off the car, he got off too. As he got off he said to me, "Don't take that car, wait for the other one." I noticed then that he went over to the corner and took a car going in the opposite direction from mine. I saw him lots of times after that, and he always got just as close as he could and stared. I always arranged it so that he could not sit next to me.
I was on the elevated with a friend the other day. We were sitting on end seats. A man got up to give a white woman his seat and then came over and stood close to us. He stood with his legs against my friend's knees, until she jerked around and sat facing me. Then he tried standing close to me. He had me so hedged in I could hardly move, and I had to make a very abrupt movement to get away. He moved on after a while.
What may be done to prevent misunderstanding and check in its incipiency trouble which might easily and suddenly become serious, is illustrated in the action of a white woman, a resident of the Chicago Commons Social Settlement:
One evening, soon after the race riot in July, 1919, I was riding on a State Street car, going south from Grand Avenue. I had only ridden a block, when there was a general stir in the car, a young woman fainted, and I learned that the conductor had been struck and his cap knocked off. Word went around the car that a "nigger" did it. Ugly remarks were being made and I feared there would be trouble. I stepped to the back of the car and asked two colored women if they knew who struck the conductor. One said, "He looked like a colored man," the other said, "I don't know." Then I asked the conductor, in a voice loud enough so that the rest of the car could hear me, whether it was a white or a black man that struck him and why. He said: "It was a white man. I wouldn't let him bring his big drum on the platform, it was too crowded." Having learned this, I turned to two young couples who were still showing much feeling and said, "A white man struck the conductor." The whole car then quieted down, and there was no more feeling.
Most of the difficulties in transportation contacts reported and generally complained of seem to have centered around the first blundering efforts of migrants to adjust themselves to northern city life. The efforts of agencies interested in assisting this adjustment, together with the Negro press, and the intimate criticisms and suggestion for proper conduct of Chicago Negroes, have smoothed down many of the roughnesses of the migrants, and as a result friction from contact in transportation seems to have lessened materially.
E. CONTACTS IN OTHER RELATIONS
Here are included:
I. Contacts in public places, such as restaurants, department stores, theaters, and personal-service places.
II. "Black and tan" resorts, which present a much-criticized association because of the vicious elements of whites and Negroes in contact there.