The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

It is possible for whites and Negroes to live in peace in Chicago. They have done so for years, in normal conditions and in normal times. They have managed to live without much prejudice. There has been good feeling. The Negro has had political equality. There has been an attempt to give him a fair representation in public affairs and not to resent his presence there.

We admit frankly that if political equality had meant the election of Negro mayors, judges, and a majority of Negroes in the city council the whites would not have tolerated it. We do not believe that the whites of Chicago would be any different from the whites of the South in this respect....

We have been able to extend the essentials of citizenship to the Negroes freely because the whites are dominant in numbers. All the essentials are in the possession of the Negro. He is not Jim-Crowed by law. A line is drawn by usage. The law in fact forbids what actually is done. It is a futile law because it encounters instinct.

Legally a Negro has right to service anywhere the public generally is served. He does not get it. Wisely he does not ask for it. There has been an illegal, non-legal, or extra-legal adjustment founded upon common sense which has worked in the past, and it will work in the future.

The fact is that so long as this city is dominated by whites, whether because of their numbers without force or by their force if they were in the minority, there will be limitations placed upon the black people. They will be limitations which will not work an injustice to the black people, who have a right to their own development.

There is no objection to economic equality. There is a decided objection to the exploitation of black labor. During the war many Negroes were brought from the South. Thousands of them went into the Stock Yards. The war shut off the supply of common labor. The South supplied the want.

Thus the population of blacks doubled in war times. Concerns which brought the Negro here to exploit him damaged the community by throwing a race question upon it. Concerns which needed the Negro and put him upon an equal basis with the whites, without importing cheap labor to take the jobs of whites, were legitimately supplying their need for labor.

The race issue in California grew out of the fact that the Japanese were cutting under the price of white labor. That will produce race troubles as quickly as anything.

Concerns may have been derelict in not considering the housing problem. The imported Negroes could not live in the streets or vacant lots. They had to get under roofs, and in getting under roof they suddenly established new contact with white neighborhoods.

In this change there was bound to be trouble unless precautions were taken. In the present case there is no evidence of precaution and some of provocation. It is possible for that question to adjust itself. Such realty movements cannot take place without friction, but the friction need not lead to riots. The city is steadily shifting in residential character. Some of the people affected by the shifts do not like it, but in normal times the readjustment is not disturbing to the community. A spread of factories may change the character of a section. A spread of Negroes may do the same thing.