We have before us an article on “The Negro in Washington,” in a recent issue of Holiday magazine, a slick-paper, 50-cent pleader for leftist causes, published, curiously enough, by the staid, rich and conservative house of Curtis, owners of the Saturday Evening Post. This effusion is illustrated with four pages purporting to show the Negro’s treatment in Democracy’s capital, which the editors call a “democratic contradiction.” There are photographs of Negro children at play in cluttered backyards which are called typical of the city’s overcrowded Negro slums. Another picture shows a Negro woman in an alley dwelling; another is captioned, “Capitol Dome presents a contrast of obvious irony to the Negro slums which it overshadows. Overcrowding, dirt and disease are all prevalent.”
Your authors traveled up and down 1,000 miles of streets and boulevards, 404 of alleys, not once but a dozen times. They saw the slums illustrated in Holiday magazine, but they saw few others, because there are few others. At the most, 20,000, of a total of 400,000 Negroes, live in these “slums,” which, even at their worst, are turreted castles compared to the degraded dwellings in which Negroes and myriad whites are forced to live in New York.
Holiday did not print one picture showing the thousands of fine homes and small apartment buildings in which most of Washington’s Negroes live.
Cup your ear and we’ll let you into a little secret about these “slums.” Whether you read Holiday or not, you’ve seen the pictures, because they are the ones which are always used by Reds and Pinks to point up to the world how gruesomely America treats its dark step-children. The reason you’ve seen these pictures—always with the Capitol dome in the background—is that there are no others available.
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the chief propagandists who exploited this “blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed, always on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and is surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt administration, when public housing and public building projects were reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed—for propaganda purposes.
The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are kept untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking degradation forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.
The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed slave-quarters area.
Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington, once residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists, now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.
In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no law against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the same restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld proprietors who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme Court decisions have gone otherwise elsewhere.
Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women all over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes, though, because of accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better spots, these contacts are not evident in the better public gathering places.