All I want for the Negro is justice—then I think the economic laws will settle this problem. Let the people interested try justice; they will find it will solve the race problem faster than any other course, just as it will solve any other problem. Treat the bad Negro just as rough as you treat the bad white man, but acclaim the good Negro after the same manner of your acclamation of the good white man.
4. SENTIMENTS STRONGER THAN RACE PREJUDICE
Class kinship stronger than race.—A Swedish employee in a department store said:
We have quite a number of Negro neighbors where I live, and several black men work with me, and I want to say I think they are just as good as anybody. There are classes of people in every race, and of course there is a rough element among the blacks. Some highbrows try to make out that they are representative, but I think opposition to the Negro in Chicago comes from the "swell" class. I do not have any different feeling for them than for the same kind of people in any other race. I think race relations will get better in Chicago. The workingman has learned that the Negro will treat him right when he is treated right, and as soon as the other folks find that out, things will be all right.
The secretary of the Cook County Labor Party said:
I have thought about this problem a good deal, and I think you will find it is the so-called middle class that is making all the trouble. The laboring-man does not care who his neighbor is, so long as he is a good neighbor. I think you can trace most of the racial activities to jealousy on the part of a certain class of American citizens who are not any too wealthy and feel constrained to maintain a sort of fictitious position in life at the expense of anybody, in this case the Negroes. You will find that the very well-to-do are not nearly so much aroused over the problem.
A Japanese said:
I think it is simply a matter of race prejudice, which of course means first of all that the color is not acceptable, while, in the second place, they were imported to the United States as slaves, and thus it always occurs in the American mind that they are a lower class of people. Furthermore, as they were slaves and the American does not like them, they don't have equal opportunities to educate themselves up to such a degree which means no more than environment. In the last place, they want to keep away from them. I think it might be said that they are willing to receive lower wages, which tends to lower the wage system; thus the American worker suffers a good deal. In the whole process the Negroes have been kept out of social and political activities that would have given them a chance to develop. Allow them to have these activities in the future and they will make more rapid progress than they have even in the past.
General historical comparisons.—A Jewish resident of the West Side said:
I believe that the segregation movement is wrong because it is unjust and because it is devoid of any principle whatever. It has not risen out of the consideration of the needs of the colored people, nor out of consideration of real advantages that the whites might thereby gain. What is back of race prejudice? Nothing more than the spirit of superiority and selfishness which moves the aristocrats to move out of a neighborhood as soon as a few common people move in. This is here too prevalent. The segregation movement has its parallel in history. Who does not remember the old Jewish Ghetto of Amsterdam, Frankfort, etc., or the Pale of Russia? What has this segregation done for the Jews? It curtailed their rise, depriving them of an opportunity to develop, and I foresee the same result in the new segregation movement, and therefore deem it a great public evil and moral issue.