Of the 1,124 cases brought before the Juvenile Court in 1906, 168 (14.9 per cent), dealt with colored children. The court records show most miserable conditions in the homes from which such children come. Usually both mother and father are working away from home all day, so that out of school hours there is no one to look after the children. They stop going to school and begin to stay out late at night and the descent to petty thieving and other offenses is swift and easy. On the morning of my visit to the Juvenile Court several colored children were brought before the judge. Harry D., a boy of eleven years, was under arrest for his second offense. Twice he had broken into a chapel, the last time stealing a lamp. The probation officer reported that on investigation, she found Harry had scarcely been in school for a year. His mother worked all day, earning three dollars a week and many days she came home only early in the morning to cook. With three brothers and a sister this boy slept on a cot in one room in which there was no other furniture except two plush chairs and a plush sofa. An uncle who lived with the children had taken to drinking and had not worked for some weeks. The neighbors also bore testimony that Harry was neglected rather than bad. Following Harry came a group of four colored boys on the charge that on the previous Sunday they had broken into a liquor store and done much mischief, such as turning on the spigots, breaking bottles full of beer and smearing pretty much everything in the store, including some cats, with black paint. The next morning they were arrested in a new house near by where they were stealing lead pipe. Eugene, the youngest boy, nine years old, had been in court two months before on the charge of incorrigibility. His father was dead but his mother, by working out by the day, managed to keep the home fairly clean and comfortable. But Eugene was a truant; he stayed out nights and was in the habit of stealing. For the lack of a more suitable solution, this nine-year-old child was committed to the reformatory at Morganza. Two of these boys, thirteen and eleven, were brothers. Their mother was dead; their father was at work in a blast furnace, while their nineteen-year-old sister, who might have kept the home, had left soon after the mother died because she thought her father was too strict. The younger boy had been staying out nights and playing truant. The older boy had never been in trouble before. He had a good reputation and claimed, as did the fourth boy, that he was not stealing but was trying to get the others away. In other cases that came before the judge the parents were themselves immoral and it is safe to say that the colored children who reach the Juvenile Court have, as a rule, seen little but the seamy side of life. A ready market for any bottle or piece of junk that these children can beg or steal is found among the numerous junk dealers. The children will be under a constant temptation to petty thieving for the sake of a few pennies so long as this kind of exchange with juveniles is allowed.
The percentage of commitments among the adult Negroes (fourteen per cent), is all out of proportion to their percentage in the population (three and six-tenths). Women are most commonly arrested for disorderly conduct; men for fighting and cutting, petit larceny and for gambling, of which craps is the favorite form. There is much drunkenness. For some time the police department of Pittsburgh has been warring against the sale of cocaine. To the mind of the warden of the Allegheny county jail the greatest single cause of crime committed by Negro men and women is the use of this drug.
It is evident that the Negroes of Pittsburgh are making commendable progress along industrial lines. Some few have been conspicuously successful while many more are earning a comfortable living and attaining property. Negroes of this class present no special problems, for they are usually good citizens and are educating and training their children to be good citizens likewise. Their needs are the needs of the rest of the community. They would be benefited by better housing, better schools, better sanitation and a clearer atmosphere. But the problems in connection with the poor, ignorant, incompetent or vicious Negroes are many and pressing.
We have seen the need for eradicating the sale of cocaine, which drags men under; and we have seen the need for rousing and equipping the ambitious among them through industrial training, comparable to that offered the southern Negro by Tuskegee and Hampton. A few of the more obvious needs of the people who live in the alleys are day nurseries to care for the babies of mothers who must go out to work; some sort of supervised play after school hours, either in connection with the schools or at playgrounds, for the older children of these same families, settlements; and most pressing of all, a building on lower Wylie avenue for social purposes with free baths, club rooms, a gymnasium and other amusements as a counteracting influence to the saloons and pool rooms that abound in this neighborhood. There is now no place in Pittsburgh where a young colored man, coming a stranger to the city, as so many are coming every year, may find innocent diversion and helpful companionship. It is becoming increasingly clear that these needs must be met by the Negroes themselves. A few, singly or in small groups, are already working for social betterment, but so far there has been no concerted, organized action. Left to themselves the Negroes are slow or unable to organize but until they do, much of their efforts as individuals will be wasted and but little definite good can be accomplished. If the white people who have had greater experience in dealing with civic and social needs realized this and extended to them their co-operation, the community as a whole, no less than the Negroes, would be richly repaid.
[THE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS OF TWO PITTSBURGH BLOCKS]
ANNA REED
COLUMBIAN SCHOOL AND SETTLEMENT, PITTSBURGH