“No, that was straight. They have a line at the Twenty-Sixth street beach. The blacks bathe on one side and the whites on the other. No law about it, but it’s just a rule that both respect. Got a match?” He pulled out his cigarette case. “Well, a little pickaninny crossed the line and climbed on a raft. A white man threw a stone at him, struck the kid and knocked him in the water. He drowned. He probably didn’t mean to do it. There was a white patrolman in the district and when he took his time about investigating and making an arrest, the blacks started organizing. They had a few run-ins, but I thought that the thing had probably died down.”
“No, about fifty of them were running toward the lake when I saw them.”
“I suppose there’ll be trouble, then. Of course, only one white man is to blame and he ought to be punished. But the blacks feel the mass hatred against them. That rope keeping them to one side of the beach is a symbol of it. The throwing of the stone, another. Last week the race riots in Washington. This week in Chicago. You’d think that such a thing was impossible after the war.”
“Oh, well, you’ll always have a color line.”
“Oh, you’ll always have different colors, but I mean that race prejudice, that unreasoning mass hatred. Levin was right about the reaction following the war. Take the Trick Track Tribe. The things I’ve found out about them. The mayor of a little town in Kansas tarred and feathered, for instance, simply because he said he was opposed to the Tribe.”
“But look at all the niggers in Chicago, wouldn’t the Tribe—?”
“No! A thousand times no! You think if you had the mob organized to hate the Negro that everything would be all right.”
“We’re not telling anyone to hate the nigger. I mean the Tribe isn’t. The Tribe wants to put the nigger in his place. And he isn’t in his place in Chicago.”
“Bunk! If you have a Tribe here, you will only crystallize all the class hatred.”
“But it’s here.”