“I have fought for the American flag and, if God so wishes, I am glad to die for it. But that flag must float over a land untainted by any alienism. You ask me how I know that Roman Catholics cannot be good Americans and I ask you to read the oath of the Knights of Columbus. It requires no further argument. It speaks for itself. You ask me why Jews cannot become good Americans and I answer because they are aliens by race, by religion and by tradition.” His voice dropped.
“As for the colored problem: you know more about it than I do. You’ve grown up with it. But some day I want to show you what Chicago is up against. I want to take you through the colored belt so that you can get some idea of how the blacks are pouring into Chicago.”
He went into details. The blacks were becoming self-assertive. They were walking proudly along the streets. They were demanding social equality in their publications. They were moving outside the black belt into white neighborhoods and spoiling property values. They were sitting next to white men—and even white women!—in the surface and elevated cars. They were developing professional men and business men, riding around in automobiles, smoking cigars. But worst of all, they were competing against white men for jobs.
“You see what’s happening in Washington? The same thing will happen in Chicago!”
XXXIII
There was a stir in the sultry July air of the metropolis of inland America. During the World War thousands of blacks had been imported to fill the depleted ranks of white men in the reeking stockyards, the sweltering foundries, the clamourous shops. With their families they had swarmed into the homes of the abandoned Red Light district to the number of 125,000 and were even crowding, here and there, beyond their boundaries into the sacred precincts of the whites.
White working men, banded into labor unions, had frowned upon their coming, but the industrial and political barons had willed it. These latter had given them work at almost white men’s pay, welded them into a political unit and permitted them to elect black representatives to sit among the city fathers. They had been lulled into the illusion that here, at last, they were free from the howling mob, the stake and torch, the hatred of the South.
They no longer bowed their heads as they walked along the streets. They could almost look a white man in the eye. They sat beside the whites on the street cars and in the “L’s,” talked to them, ate beside them at some restaurants and even, in certain dance halls, danced with their daughters. A few had intermarried.
The whites were growing restless. A spirit was blowing through them and uniting them. White workmen were becoming frightened and then enraged at the black intruders, who competed with them for food. Clerks who sat in the “L’s” turned their nostrils away from the Negroes beside them. Men of a hundred occupations, creeds and politics, who had been individuals since the war, suddenly found themselves once more a unit—a unit because of their common color. The Negroes felt the unity of their blackness.
Freeman smelled the coming storm, like a thousand other men, and prophesied about it freely.