Watching the colored children for many months in their play and work, I have looked for possible distinctive traits. The second generation of New Yorkers greatly resembles the "Young America" of all nationalities of the city, shrill-voiced, disrespectful, easily diverted, whether at work or at play, shrewd, alert, and mischievous—the New York street child. I remember once helping with a club of eight boys where seven nationalities were represented, and where no one could have distinguished Irish from German or Jew from Italian, with his eyes shut. Had a Negro been brought up among them he would quickly have taken on their ways. Of the colored children who model their lives after their mischievous young white neighbors, many outdo the whites in depravity and lawlessness; but among the boys and girls who live by themselves, as on San Juan Hill, one sees occasional interesting traits.
The records of the Children's Court of New York (Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx) throw a little light on this matter, and are sufficiently important to quote with some fulness. For the three years studied, 1904, 1905, 1906, I tabulated the cases of the colored children brought before the court, and also the cases of the children of the Tenth and Eleventh Wards, chiefly Hungarians and Russian Jews, expecting to find, in two such dissimilar groups, interesting comparisons. The following table shows the result of this study. The court in its annual report gives the figures for the total number of arrests which I have incorporated in my table:
| Negro Arrests | 10th and 11th Wards Arrests | Total arrests for all children in Manhattan and Bronx | ||||
| No. of children | Arrests per cent | No. of children | Arrests per cent | No. of children | Arrests per cent | |
| Petit larceny | 56 | 7.8 | 139 | 6.8 | 2,697 | 10.1 |
| Grand larceny | 27 | 3.8 | 108 | 5.3 | 878 | 3.3 |
| Burglary--Robbery | 27 | 3.8 | 116 | 5.7 | 1,383 | 5.2 |
| Assault | 27 | 3.8 | 61 | 3.0 | 669 | 2.5 |
| Improper guardianship | 221 | 30.8 | 305 | 15.0 | 6,386 | 23.9 |
| Disorderly child--ungovernable child | 90 | 12.6 | 124 | 6.1 | 1,980 | 7.4 |
| Depraved girl | 33 | 4.6 | 21 | 1.1 | 312 | 1.2 |
| Violation of labor law | 0 | 0.0 | 73 | 3.5 | 592 | 2.1 |
| Unlicensed peddling[8] | 0 | 0.0 | 130 | 6.4 | 0 | 0.0 |
| Truancy | 5 | 0.7 | 23 | 1.0 | 298 | 1.1 |
| Malicious mischief | 1 | 0.1 | 9 | 0.4 | 179 | 0.7 |
| Violation of Park Corporation ordinances | 0 | 0.0 | 25 | 1.2 | 175 | 0.7 |
| Mischief, including craps, throwing stones,building bonfires, fighting, etc. | 214 | 29.8 | 896 | 43.7 | 10,267 | 38.4 |
| Unclassified felonies, misdemeanors | 13 | 1.8 | 16 | 0.7 | 799 | 3.0 |
| All others | 3 | 0.4 | 3 | 0.1 | 90 | 0.4 |
| 717 | 100.0 | 2049 | 100.0 | 26,705 | 100.0 | |
Percentage of Negro to total, 1904-1907 2.7
Percentage of Negro to total, 1907-1910 1.9
Our table shows us that which we have already noted, the high percentage of improper guardianship among the Negroes and the grave number of depraved Negro girls. For the sins of petit larceny, grand larceny, and burglary, putting the three together, the colored child shows a slightly smaller percentage than the East Side white, a noticeably smaller percentage than the total number of children. The sin of theft is often swiftly attributed to a black face, but this percentage indicates that the colored child has no "innate tendency" to steal. Ten per cent of the arrests among the East Side children are for unlicensed peddling and violation of the labor law, but no little Negro boys plunge into the business world before their time. They have no keen commercial sense to lead them to undertake transactions on their own account, and they are not desired by purchasers of boy labor in the city.
The most important heading, numerically, is that of mischief, and here the Negro falls far behind the Eastsider, behind the average for the whole. While depravity among the girls and improper guardianship are the race's most serious defects, as shown by the arrests among its children in New York, tractability and a decent regard for law are among its merits. The colored child, especially if he is in a segregated neighborhood, is not greatly inclined to mischief. My own experience has shown me that life in a tenement on San Juan Hill is devoid of the ingenious, exasperating deviltry of an Irish or German-American neighborhood. No daily summons calls one to the door only to hear wildly scurrying footsteps on the stairs. Mail boxes are left solely for the postman's use, and hallways are not defaced by obscene writing. There is plenty of crap shooting, rarely interfered with by the police, but there is little impertinent annoyance or destructiveness.
An observer, watching the little colored boys and girls as they play on the city streets, finds much that is attractive and pleasant. They sing their songs, learned at school and on the playground, fly their kites, spin their tops, run their races. They usually finish what they begin, not turning at the first interruption to take up something else. They move more deliberately than most children, and their voices are slower to adopt the New York screech than those of their Irish neighbors on the block above them. Altogether they are attractive children, particularly the smaller ones, who are more energetic than their big brothers and sisters. Good manners are often evident. While receiving an afternoon call from two girls, aged four and five, I was invited by the older to partake of half a peanut, the other half of which she split in two and generously shared with her companion. "Gim'me five cents," I once heard a Negro boy of twelve say to his mother who walked past him on the street. She did not seem to hear, but the boy's companion, a youth of the same age, reproved him severely for his rude speech. When walking with an Irish friend, who had worked among the children of her own race, I saw a colored boy run swiftly up the block to meet his mother. He kissed her, took her bundle from her, and carrying it under his arm, walked quietly by her side to their home. "There are many boys here," I said, "who are just as courteous as that." "Is that so?" she retorted quickly, "Then you needn't be explaining to me any further the reason for the high death rate."
The gentle, chivalrous affection of the child for its mother is daily to be seen among these boys and girls. "Your African," said Mary Kingsley, "is little better than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love he gives to none other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor in his life that it must be taken into consideration in attempting to understand the true Negro."[9] And if the child lavishes affection upon its parent, the mother in turn gives untiringly to her child. She is the "mammy" of whom we have so often heard, but with her loving care bestowed, as it should be, upon her own offspring. She tries to keep her child clean in body and spirit and to train it to be gentle and good; and in return usually she receives a stanch devotion. I once found fault with a colored girl of ten years for her rude behavior with her girl companions, adding that perhaps she did not know any better, at which she turned on me almost fiercely and said, "It's our fault; we know better. Our mothers learn us. It's we that's bold." As one watches the boys and girls walking quietly up the street of a Sunday afternoon to their Sunday-school, neatly and cleanly dressed, one appreciates the anxious, maternal care that strives as best it knows how, to rear honest and God-fearing men and women.