In dealing with colored men on parole, our experience has been that fully as large a proportion have completed their parole with credit as in the case of white men under parole. I should say that the task of securing employment has been less difficult because colored men as a rule have been less critical as to the kind of employment they would accept. They have been willing to make an honest living at any work that is offered.
John L. Whitman, superintendent of state prisons:
I have seen many colored men, young men or boys, who gave every evidence of a sincere desire to do well on the outside. They meet with disappointment that they did not expect, hardships, difficulty in securing work as well as homes, and they fall. The desire was there just the same. The opportunities were not. But when the employer gives him a chance, the Negro appreciates it and he sticks—and we have had employers say during the last year many times, "If you have got such colored men as you have sent before, give them to us in preference to the whites, because there is a lack of appreciation on the part of white men."
14. ENVIRONMENT: VICE IN NEGRO RESIDENCE AREAS
General Leroy T. Steward:
Where Negroes have come in and as a result white people have moved out and the neighborhood has, plainly speaking, deteriorated, there is a great tendency to permit infractions of the law, as in any neighborhoods which are regarded as not as important as high-class residence neighborhoods. For instance, Calumet Avenue from Thirty-first to Thirty-ninth streets is entirely colored. Fifteen years ago it was entirely white. Now it would be much easier to establish vice there than it would have been fifteen years ago when a lot of well-known people lived in the neighborhood.
Major L. M. C. Funkhouser:
Most of the Negroes found in disorderly houses are employees. There was one notorious place down there that we closed where they were all colored. That was the most notorious one we had.
Professor Charles E. Merriam:
I think there is this to be said about the colored side of it there [on the South Side]: I am asked whether the colored protest against disorderly resorts would be as effective as a protest made by an equal number of white men. Making allowance for the fluctuating conditions in a long period, I don't believe it would be quite as effective. Not only that, but I don't think the colored people are so well organized to fight these evils as a class of men ... they have not the wealth. In the territory upon the North Side or in any territory where there are many lawyers and people of some means, if they found a place like that they would never rest until they got it out. They would just keep at it with time and money until they forced it out.