But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,” developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.
Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as follows:
When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.
After the block-buster—in her own name—made the purchase, she and her large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started another Negro island in the city.
When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base and repeated the process.
You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.
In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare. In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive, aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially policemen.
Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:
Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States. Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury, former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.