7. ATTITUDES DETERMINED BY CONTACTS
No contacts but a hostile attitude.—A resident at Drexel Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street said:
I don't see many niggers around here; most of them are west of Cottage Grove Avenue. I never had any dealings with them, so can't tell you anything much. I know I don't want niggers living next door to me, but I can't tell you why. Do you want them next-door neighbors to you? There are some living down in the next block—two families of them—between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth, and I guess they are pretty wild, but I have never seen them. It's just what people tell me. I never had any dealings with them.
Generalization from a particular experience.—A teacher in the Wendell Phillips High School said:
You can't trust the best of them. The minute you have your back turned something disappears. They are the worst bunch of little thieves I ever struck. A few weeks ago I had a colored girl helping me fix costumes in my little office. During the hour she was in there I was absent about five minutes. She had hardly got out of the building before I discovered that a dollar had disappeared out of my purse. I questioned her for thirty minutes next morning, but not a word of confession. Another time I had small change in the top drawer of my desk. While I was teaching a class, two girls slipped into the office and helped themselves to half of it. I surprised them when I unexpectedly entered the office to get something. Everything here that isn't tied or watched walks off. It didn't used to be this way before the colored came in so thick; then I never locked my office, and now I have everything under lock.
The proprietor of a woman's dress shop on Sixty-third Street said:
Little of my trade is colored, possibly 2 per cent. We do not cater to colored trade. We do not want it. If colored people come in, we will sell them if they buy quick and get out. Our trade does not care to deal where colored people are also accommodated.... You will find it pretty hard to be neutral in Chicago. The more I know of niggers, the more I am convinced that there is no good nigger but a dead one. I had a colored helper who wanted tips every time he was asked to render services outside of his recognized regular duties. I gave him a good salary, $18 per week, and yet he was never satisfied, and one day he got hold of the keys to the cash drawer and ran away with $300.
Exaggerated notion of prosperity.—A physician said:
I think that the solution of the race problem can come only by recognition by white men of the Negroes' potential equality. They are only fifty years out of slavery, and in that fifty years they have progressed faster than the white race has done in a hundred years. The Negro man of forty today is less advanced than the white man of forty, but I expect his son to be almost on a par with our sons, and his grandson will be every whit as good. The husband of the colored woman who has been getting our dinners for us for a number of years is making more killing steers for Armour than I am. He makes $16 a day. They have $12,000 worth of Liberty bonds. They are sending all of their relatives through high school and declare they will put them through the University of Chicago. In fact we are compelling the Negro to get an education, and he cannot help but progress. Colonizing the Negro is merely making him bitter and postponing the day of settlement. Presently we shall have with us under such a régime a race of comparative equals very much disgruntled by the unfair treatment accorded them. I think you will find that practically all the professional men in this building, at least a very large percentage of them, think as I do on this subject.
Contact with servants.—A resident of Woodlawn said: