Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

It was found that young colored girls, like the boys, often become desperately discouraged in their efforts to find employment other than domestic or personal service. Highschool girls of refined appearance, after looking for weeks, will find nothing open to them in department stores, office buildings, or manufacturing establishments, save a few positions as maids placed in the women’s waiting rooms. Such girls find it continually assumed by the employment agencies to whom they apply for positions that they are willing to serve as domestics in low-class hotels and disreputable houses. Of course the agency does not explain the character of the place to which it sends the girl, but going to one address after another the girl herself finds that the places are all of one kind.

Recently an intelligent colored girl who had kept a careful record of her experiences with three employment agencies came to the office of the Juvenile Protective Association to see what might be done to protect colored girls less experienced and self-reliant than herself against similar temptations. Another young colored girl who, at the age of fifteen, had been sent to a house of prostitution by an employment agency, was rescued from the house, treated in a hospital and sent to her sister in a western state. She there married a respectable man and is now living in a little home “almost paid for.”

The case of Eliza M., who has worked as cook in a disreputable house for ten years, is that of a woman forced into vicious surroundings. In addition to her wages of five dollars a week and food which she is permitted to take home every evening to her family, she has been able to save her generous “tips” for the education of her three children for whom she is very ambitious.

Colored young women who are manicurists and hair dressers find it continually assumed that they will be willing to go to hotels under compromising conditions and when a decent girl refuses to go, she is told that that is all that she can expect. There is no doubt that the few colored girls who find positions as stenographers or bookkeepers are much more open to insult than white girls in similar positions.

All these experiences tend to discourage the young people from that “education” which their parents so eagerly desire for them and also makes it extremely difficult for them to maintain their standards of self-respect.

In spite of various efforts on the part of colored people themselves to found homes for dependent and semi-delinquent colored children the accommodations are totally inadequate, which is the more remarkable as the public records all give a high percentage of negro criminals. In Chicago the police department gives 7.7 per cent., the Juvenile Court 6.5 per cent., the county jail 10 per cent.

Those familiar with the police and the courts believe that negroes are often arrested on excuses too flimsy to hold a white man, that any negro who happens to be near the scene of a crime or disorder is promptly arrested and often convicted on evidence upon which a white man would be discharged. Certainly the Juvenile Protective Association has on record cases in which a negro has been arrested without sufficient cause and convicted on inadequate evidence. A certain type of policeman, of juryman, and of prosecuting attorney has apparently no scruples in sending a “nigger up the road” on mere suspicion.

There is the record in the files of the Association of the case of George W., a colored boy, nineteen years old, who was born in Chicago and who had attended the public schools through one year at high school. He lived with his mother and had worked steadily for three years as a porter in a large grocery store, when one day he was arrested on a charge of rape.

In the late afternoon of that day a woman eighty-three years old was assaulted by a negro and was saved from the horrible attack only by the timely arrival of her daughter, who so frightened the assailant that he jumped out of a window. Two days later George was arrested, charged with the crime. At the police station he was not allowed to sleep, was beaten, cuffed and kicked, and finally, battered and frightened, he confessed that he had committed the crime.

When he appeared in court, his lawyer advised him to plead guilty, although the boy explained that he had not committed the crime and had confessed simply because he was forced to do so. The evidence against him was so flimsy that the judge referred to it in his instructions to the jury. The state’s attorney had failed to establish the ownership of the cap dropped by the fleeing assailant and the time of the attempted act was changed during the testimony. The description given by the people who saw the colored man running away did not correspond to George’s appearance. Nevertheless the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced the boy to fourteen years in the penitentiary. When one of the men who had seen the guilty man running away from the old woman’s house was asked why he did not make his testimony more explicit, he replied, “Oh, well, he’s only a nigger anyway.”