White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480 Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white club admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band leader.
It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men. Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men consorting with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.
A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue, disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a Texas physician.
Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same U. S. agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night—and paid him for it.
Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her home in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored musician named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the marijuana from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white Washington girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said they had unnatural sex relations with him—they were afraid of pregnancy.
Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until 1949, the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either whites or Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total number of swimmers was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two pools were set aside for colored and four for white. In 1949, when there were no racial bars, total attendance dropped off to 332,000. One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for most of the summer after disturbances started when colored swimmers first attempted to use the pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it completely.
It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed about the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was ended and the millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official figures released a few days later showed attendance had skidded another 33 percent, down to a total of 220,000, of which—and get this—only one-third were Negroes. In other words, whites had almost stopped using the pools; on the other hand, there were barely more Negro patrons than when the pools were restricted. Agitation was heard from tax-payers to shut the pools, now run at a heavy loss to the city.
Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the founding of the city was banned from the stage of a high school auditorium because it had a mixed cast. The school board said: “Congress makes the law and we enforce it.” There is a technical question about whether a colored member of the board may visit white schools, and vice versa.
Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment in the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at this writing has not been overruled.