All colored people are especially fond of music, but almost the only outlet the young people find for their musical facility is in vaudeville shows, amusement parks and inferior types of theaters. That which should be a great source of inspiration tends to pull them down, as their love of pleasure, lacking innocent expression, draws them toward the vice district, where alone the color line disappears.
Model Dance
Hall Opposed
by White
People
An effort was recently made by some colored people on the South Side to start a model dance hall. The white people of the vicinity, assuming that it would be an objectionable place, successfully opposed it as a public nuisance and this effort toward better recreation facilities had to be abandoned.
Colored Boys
Cannot Bathe
in Lake
Michigan
Even the waters of Lake Michigan are not available for colored children. They are not welcomed by the white children at the bathing beaches and late last summer one little colored boy who attempted to bathe at the Thirty-ninth street beach was mobbed and treated so roughly that the police were obliged to send in a riot call.
This investigation would certainly explain the presence of so large a proportion of colored boys in the county jail on the following grounds: First, the colored children are forced to live in the very worst neighborhoods in Chicago and even there the colored families are charged such high rents that the house is filled with “floaters” of a very undesirable class, so that the children witness all kinds of offenses against decency within the house as well as on the streets.
Second, the fathers of the families, because they are so circumscribed in their lines of occupation, work for very small wages, with the inevitable outcome that the mothers go out to work and neglect their children. As a result, the colored children are underfed, irregular in school attendance, make slow progress in their studies and drop out of school at the earliest possible moment.
Third, there are not enough places in Chicago where negro children may find wholesome amusement. Of the fifteen small parks and playgrounds with field houses, only two are really utilized by colored children.
They avoid the others because of friction and difficulty which they constantly encountered with the white children. The commercial amusements found in the neighborhoods of colored people are of the lowest type of pool rooms and saloons, which are artificially numerous because so many young colored men find their first employment in these two occupations and with their experience and very little capital are able to open places for themselves.
Perhaps the greatest factor of all is the difficulty which all colored people have in finding employment; and after an ambitious boy has been refused employment again and again in the larger mercantile and industrial establishments and comes to the conclusion that there is no use in trying to get a decent job, he is in a very dangerous state of mind. Idle and discouraged, his neighborhood environments vicious, such a boy quickly shows the first symptoms of delinquency and the remedial agencies which should be prompt in his case are the very weakest at this point. Added to this is the conviction held by many colored boys and young men that “the police have it in for them and do not accord them fair treatment.”