Dr. F. Emory Lyon, superintendent, Central Howard Association:
Our observation would indicate that the Negro delinquent has suffered under the handicap of unsatisfactory home conditions. Owing to the general public discrimination, fewer opportunities have been offered him. In addition to adverse conditions in the home, some opportunities in public places have been denied him. Some of the discrimination and ostracism on the part of his associates has been unconscious in many instances. The colored boy has especially few recreational facilities.
Mr. O. J. Milliken:
It is up to us to give them the best that there is, and we can clean up those districts. I don't believe the question of color is going to enter into the matter at all if we once clean up the districts where they are obliged to live.
Myron Adams, former pastor of the First Baptist Church:
North of my church for a block or two along Thirty-first Street at the time I went there was almost exclusively a white residence district. The moral conditions could not have been worse. I had a list in my church study of the houses of prostitution and other lawless agencies gathered by the police and the Committee of Fifteen. I don't know of a district in Chicago where there were more gunmen, more high-class criminals, more high-class prostitutes than there were within three blocks of the First Baptist Church when I came there as pastor.
Speaking from my observation I think that any colored community is liable to be imposed upon by white men who are vicious, and the colored people get no encouragement when they themselves endeavor to rout out that vice. White prostitutes and white gamblers and vicious resorts come into the "Black Belt" because it is black; they operate with more safety than they do in the white belt. That is true of every American city that I know of personally.
15. ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL ASPECTS OF NEGRO CRIME
Judge Charles M. Thomson:
Colored people who were up before me in the criminal court were mostly men who did not have steady employment.... My experience was that the environmental conditions out of which the colored defendant arose were an environment of idleness, very largely. I would say, as to the economic factors, that I don't remember a case that I had involving a colored defendant whom I would call prosperous, whereas there were many white defendants who were very prosperous. Most of the colored people tried were in stringent circumstances and poverty.