7. Inciting and inflammatory headlines in the newspapers must be stopped.
8. Open the gates of employment to all races in our public utilities, such as street-car and elevated-road service, Chicago Telephone Co. exchanges, Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co., and the Commonwealth Edison Co.
9. Better housing for the colored people and improvement of the district in which a vast majority of them reside by turning certain streets into boulevards, building small parks and playgrounds, and let the city or South Park Commissioners build a bathing-beach equal to any other for the benefit and comfort of all races along the water front, between Twenty-ninth and Thirty-ninth streets. This without lines or thought of segregation and for the benefit of a neglected part of our tax-paying community.
10. Apprehend and convict the bomb throwers by placing in command of our police-stations officers who will do their duty and place patrolmen on duty who will not sympathize with this lawless element of our citizenry. Greater still, insist that the state's attorney do his full duty in prosecuting the people who are responsible for inciting these criminal acts.
11. Safeguard the rights of all races in our public parks and on the public highways.
12. Give us a man's chance in the field of labor, and we will prove that we are no burden to any other race of people.
2. THE EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND
An old settler.—The sentiment presented below is probably the unpolished feeling of a Negro who was born in Chicago before the fire of 1871, and has lived here since. His grandfather owned the property where the post-office now stands. He was at one time a member of the Central Y.M.C.A. (white). For two and a half years he was assistant bookkeeper in a white bank in Memphis, Tennessee. He said:
Prejudice has been on the increase in Chicago since 1893. Southerners came to the World's Exposition and many of them remained. They brought their prejudices with them. On the cars they would order colored people to get up and give their seats to them. This resulted in fights, and when the cases were taken to court colored people won as many cases as whites. I took my grandmother to the fair and on the street car I had an altercation with a white southerner who called her "Auntie." He tried to hit me, and I got out my gun to shoot him. A Columbian guard and detective grabbed me. When the case was called I was discharged.
Hyde Park is a nest of prejudice. These southerners moved out there. Southern clubs are established throughout the country. They get northernized and want straight-haired mulatto maids for their mistresses and call them typists. The southern white boys get jobs on newspapers in the North and work for nothing in order that they may write articles and editorials against Negroes and spread the doctrine of the South.