Judge Kickham Scanlan:
My experience in the criminal court is that the colored defendant, even in bailable cases, is unable to give bail. He has to stay in jail, and therefore his case is very quickly disposed of by the prosecutor. Defendants locked up are usually tried first. The colored man is more apt to be out of work than the white man, and that is a possible reason for the large number of arrests of Negroes. His sphere is very limited, and if there is any let up in the industry that is involved in that sphere, he is a victim. I have often wondered if you could change the skins of a thousand white men in the city of Chicago and handicap them the way the colored man is handicapped today, how many of those white men in ten years' time would be law-abiding citizens.
Professor Charles E. Merriam:
This problem as I see it is very complicated. We have to deal first with the matter of economic class which is at the bottom of a good deal of it, then with the matter of race, which is at the bottom of a good deal more of it, although perhaps not as much as class; then there is the matter of politics or a system which has grown up for thirty or forty years back, which makes the class and race relations a good deal more difficult to deal with.
If every man had good housing conditions and a steady job, at a living wage, a good opportunity for education, there would not be very much crime.... Particularly in the case of the colored people, the crime is on the part of the community, on the part of the city that allows bad conditions to exist. Negroes ought to be protected. They don't get protection for the same reason that it is always hard to protect the economically weak against the strong. There is not any use of making a lot of fine phrases about it—that is largely where the trouble lies.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY
A. EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES AND CONDITIONS
I. INTRODUCTION
1. NEGRO WORKING POPULATION IN 1920
Between 1910 and 1920 the Negro population of Chicago increased from 44,103 to 109,594. Of this number it is estimated that about 70,000 were engaged in industries in 1920 as compared with about 27,000 in 1910.[49]