Employment agents do not hesitate to send colored girls as servants to these houses. They make the astounding statement that the law does not allow them to send white girls, but they will furnish colored help.
In summing up, it is an appalling fact that practically all of the male and female servants connected with houses of prostitution in vice districts and in disorderly flats in residence sections are colored....
The apparent discrimination against colored citizens of the city in permitting vice to be set down in their very midst is unjust and abhorrent to all fair-minded people. Colored children should receive the same moral protection that white children receive.
The prejudice against colored girls who are ambitious to earn an honest living is unjust. Such an attitude eventually drives them into immoral surroundings. They need special care and protection on the maxim that it is the duty of the strong to help the weak. Any effort, therefore, to improve conditions in Chicago should provide more wholesome surroundings for the families of its colored citizens who now live in communities of colored people.
That many Negroes live near vice districts is not due to their choice nor to low moral standards, but to three causes: (1) Negroes are unwelcome in desirable white residence localities; (2) small incomes compel them to live in the least expensive places regardless of surroundings; while premises rented for immoral purposes bring notoriously high rentals, they make the neighborhood undesirable and the rent of other living quarters there abnormally low; and (3) Negroes lack sufficient influence and power to protest effectively against the encroachments of vice.
The records of convictions in the morals court and the evidence of the Committee of Fifteen show the gradual drift of prostitution southward coincidentally with the expansions of the main area of Negro residence.
Between 1916 and 1918 houses of prostitution decreased from forty-eight to twenty-five in number in the territory between Twelfth and Twenty-second streets, and from 130 to 107 between Twelfth and Thirty-first streets. Between Thirty-first and Thirty-fifth streets, the number had slightly increased, while there was an increase of nearly 80 per cent between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-ninth streets. In the combined districts between Thirty-first and Thirty-ninth streets the number increased from sixty-two to eighty-four; and between Thirty-ninth and Fifty-fifth streets the increase was from eleven to fifty-four.
These are probably only a fraction of the number that really exist there, and while they are too few to be conclusive, they are significant when considered in relation to the movement of the Negro population. The accompanying maps show that the figures coincide substantially with the expansion of Negro residence areas southward and eastward.
Further evidence of this movement of vicious resorts, and an abnormally large number of them, into the Negro areas was obtained from the state's attorney's office, the Commission's investigations, and from confidential reports submitted by other organizations. Most of these places are maintained by white persons, because in this district there is less likelihood of effective interference, either from citizens or public authorities.
Cabarets and gambling.—In close relation to the disorderly houses are the vicious cabarets in the Negro areas on the South Side. Their reputation and the conditions existing in them have been given much publicity by the local press.