THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK.
The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture
its proper shading. The landlord does the drawing, does it with an
absence of pretence, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not
brutal. The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own
soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants.
Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay
out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase
banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at
his door, with unruffled complacency. It is business, he will tell you.
And it is. He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well,
and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is
there for.
That his pencil does not make quite as black a mark as it did, that
the hand that wields it does not bear down as hard as only a short
half dozen years ago, is the hopeful sign of an awakening public
conscience under the stress of which the line shows signs of wavering.
But for this the landlord deserves no credit. It has come, is coming
about despite him. The line may not be wholly effaced while the name
of the negro, alone among the world's races, is spelled with a small
n. Natural selection will have more or less to do beyond a doubt in
every age with dividing the races; only so, it may be, can they work
out together their highest destiny. But with the despotism that
deliberately assigns to the defenceless Black the lowest level for
the purpose of robbing him there that has nothing to do. Of such
slavery, different only in degree from the other kind that held him
as a chattel, to be sold or bartered at the will of his master, this
century, if signs fail not, will see the end in New York.
Ever since the war New York has been receiving the overflow of colored
population from the Southern cities. In the last decade this migration
has grown to such proportions that it is estimated that our Blacks have
quite doubled in number since the Tenth Census. Whether the exchange
has been of advantage to the negro may well be questioned. Trades of
which he had practical control in his Southern home are not open to
him here. I know that it may be answered that there is no industrial
proscription of color; that it is a matter of choice. Perhaps so. At
all events he does not choose then. How many colored carpenters or
masons has anyone seen at work in New York? In the South there are
enough of them and, if the testimony of the most intelligent of their
people is worth anything, plenty of them have come here. As a matter of
fact the colored man takes in New York, without a struggle, the lower
level of menial service for which his past traditions and natural love
of ease perhaps as yet fit him best. Even the colored barber is rapidly
getting to be a thing of the past. Along shore, at any unskilled labor,
he works unmolested; but he does not appear to prefer the job. His
sphere thus defined, he naturally takes his stand among the poor, and
in the homes of the poor. Until very recent times--the years since a
change was wrought can be counted on the fingers of one hand--he was
practically restricted in the choice of a home to a narrow section
on the West Side, that nevertheless had a social top and bottom to
it--the top in the tenements on the line of Seventh Avenue as far north
as Thirty-second Street, where he was allowed to occupy the houses of
unsavory reputation which the police had cleared and for which decent
white tenants could not be found; the bottom in the vile rookeries
of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue, the old "Africa" that is
now fast becoming a modern Italy. To-day there are black colonies in
Yorkville and Morrisania. The encroachment of business and the Italian
below, and the swelling of the population above, have been the chief
agents in working out his second emancipation, a very real one, for
with his cutting loose from the old tenements there has come a distinct
and gratifying improvement in the tenant, that argues louder than
theories or speeches the influence of vile surroundings in debasing
the man. The colored citizen whom this year's census man found in his
Ninety-ninth Street "flat" is a very different individual from the
"nigger" his predecessor counted in the black-and-tan slums of Thompson
and Sullivan Streets. There is no more clean and orderly community in
New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up
on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.
Cleanliness is the characteristic of the negro in his new surroundings,
as it was his virtue in the old. In this respect he is immensely the
superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish
Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.
Nevertheless, he has always had to pay higher rents than even these
for the poorest and most stinted rooms. The exceptions I have come
across, in which the rents, though high, have seemed more nearly on a
level with what was asked for the same number and size of rooms in the
average tenement, were in the case of tumble-down rookeries in which no
one else would live, and were always coupled with the condition that
the landlord should "make no repairs." It can readily be seen, that his
profits were scarcely curtailed by his "humanity." The reason advanced
for this systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the
same house with colored tenants, or even in a house recently occupied
by negroes, and that consequently its selling value is injured. The
prejudice undoubtedly exists, but it is not lessened by the house
agents, who have set up the maxim "once a colored house, always a
colored house."
There is method in the maxim, as shown by an inquiry made last year by
the _Real Estate Record_. It proved agents to be practically unanimous
in the endorsement of the negro as a clean, orderly, and "profitable"
tenant. Here is the testimony of one of the largest real estate firms
in the city: "We would rather have negro tenants in our poorest class
of tenements than the lower grades of foreign white people. We find the
former cleaner than the latter, and they do not destroy the property
so much. We also get higher prices. We have a tenement on Nineteenth
Street, where we get $10 for two rooms which we could not get more
than $7.50 for from white tenants previously. We have a four-story
tenement on our books on Thirty-third Street, between Sixth and Seventh
Avenues, with four rooms per floor--a parlor, two bedrooms, and a
kitchen. We get $20 for the first floor, $24 for the second, $23 for
the third and $20 for the fourth, in all $87 or $1,044 per annum. The
size of the building is only 21+55." Another firm declared that in a
specified instance they had saved fifteen to twenty per cent. on the
gross rentals since they changed their white tenants for colored ones.
Still another gave the following case of a front and rear tenement
that had formerly been occupied by tenants of a "low European type,"
who had been turned out on account of filthy habits and poor pay. The
negroes proved cleaner, better, and steadier tenants. Instead, however,
of having their rents reduced in consequence, the comparison stood as
follows:
_Rents under White Tenants._
Per month.
Front-- 1st floor (store, etc.) $21
2d " 13
3d " 13
4th " (and rear) 21
Rear-- 2d " 12
3d " 12
4th " (see front) --
Rear house--1st " 8
2d " 10
3d " 9
4th " 8
----
Total $127
_Rents under Colored Tenants._
Per month.
Front-- 1st floor (store, etc.) $21
2d " 14
3d " 14
4th " 14
Rear-- 2d " 12
3d " 13
4th " 13
Rear house--1st " 10
2d " 12
3d " 11
4th " 10
----
Total $144
An increased rental of $17 per month, or $204 a year, and an advance of
nearly thirteen and one-half per cent. on the gross rental "in favor"
of the colored tenant. Profitable, surely!
I have quoted these cases at length in order to let in light on the
quality of this landlord despotism that has purposely confused the
public mind, and for its own selfish ends is propping up a waning
prejudice. It will be cause for congratulation if indeed its time has
come at last. Within a year, I am told by one of the most intelligent
and best informed of our colored citizens, there has been evidence,
simultaneous with the colored hegira from the low down-town tenements,
of a movement toward less exorbitant rents. I cannot pass from this
subject without adding a leaf from my own experience that deserves a
place in this record, though, for the credit of humanity, I hope as
an extreme case. It was last Christmas that I had occasion to visit
the home of an old colored woman in Sixteenth Street, as the almoner
of generous friends out of town who wished me to buy her a Christmas
dinner. The old woman lived in a wretched shanty, occupying two mean,
dilapidated rooms at the top of a sort of hen-ladder that went by the
name of stairs. For these she paid ten dollars a month out of her
hard-earned wages as a scrub-woman. I did not find her in and, being
informed that she was "at the agent's," went around to hunt her up. The
agent's wife appeared, to report that Ann was out. Being in a hurry
it occurred to me that I might save time by making her employer the
purveyor of my friend's bounty, and proposed to entrust the money, two
dollars, to her to be expended for Old Ann's benefit. She fell in with
the suggestion at once, and confided to me in the fullness of her heart
that she liked the plan, inasmuch as "I generally find her a Christmas
dinner myself, and this money--she owes Mr. ---- (her husband, the agent)
a lot of rent." Needless to state that there was a change of programme
then and there, and that Ann was saved from the sort of Christmas cheer
that woman's charity would have spread before her. When I had the old
soul comfortably installed in her own den, with a chicken and "fixin's"
and a bright fire in her stove, I asked her how much she owed of her
rent. Her answer was that she did not really owe anything, her month
not being quite up, but that the amount yet unpaid was--two dollars!
Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts with
imperturbable cheerfulness. His philosophy is of the kind that has no
room for repining. Whether lie lives in an Eighth Ward barrack or in
a tenement with a brown-stone front and pretensions to the title of
"flat," he looks at the sunny side of life and enjoys it. He loves fine
clothes and good living a good deal more than he does a bank account.
The proverbial rainy day it would be rank ingratitude, from his point
of view, to look for when the sun shines unclouded in a clear sky.
His home surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflect
his blithesome temper. The poorest negro housekeeper's room in New
York is bright with gaily-colored prints of his beloved "Abe Linkum,"
General Grant, President Garfield, Mrs. Cleveland, and other national
celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. In the art of
putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making
a little go a long way, our negro has no equal. When a fair share of
prosperity is his, he knows how to make life and home very pleasant
to those about him. Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown
homes of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air. But even
where the wolf howls at the door, he makes a bold and gorgeous front.
The amount of "style" displayed on fine Sundays on Sixth and Seventh
Avenues by colored holiday-makers would turn a pessimist black with
wrath. The negro's great ambition is to rise in the social scale to
which his color has made him a stranger and an outsider, and he is
quite willing to accept the shadow for the substance where that is
the best he can get. The claw-hammer coat and white tie of a waiter
in a first-class summer hotel, with the chance of taking his ease in
six months of winter, are to him the next best thing to mingling with
the white quality he serves, on equal terms. His festive gatherings,
pre-eminently his cake-walks, at which a sugared and frosted cake is
the proud prize of the couple with the most aristocratic step and
carriage, are comic mixtures of elaborate ceremonial and the joyous
abandon of the natural man. With all his ludicrous incongruities, his
sensuality and his lack of moral accountability, his superstition and
other faults that are the effect of temperament and of centuries of
slavery, he has his eminently good points. He is loyal to the backbone,
proud of being an American and of his new-found citizenship. He is at
least as easily moulded for good as for evil. His churches are crowded
to the doors on Sunday nights when the colored colony turns out to
worship. His people own church property in this city upon which they
have paid half a million dollars out of the depth of their poverty,
with comparatively little assistance from their white brethren. He
is both willing and anxious to learn, and his intellectual status is
distinctly improving. If his emotions are not very deeply rooted, they
are at least sincere while they last, and until the tempter gets the
upper hand again.
Of all the temptations that beset him, the one that troubles him and
the police most is his passion for gambling. The game of policy is a
kind of unlawful penny lottery specially adapted to his means, but
patronized extensively by poor white players as well. It is the meanest
of swindles, but reaps for its backers rich fortunes wherever colored
people congregate. Between the fortune-teller and the policy shop,
closely allied frauds always, the wages of many a hard day's work are
wasted by the negro; but the loss causes him few regrets. Penniless,
but with undaunted faith in his ultimate "luck," he looks forward to
the time when he shall once more be able to take a hand at "beating
policy." When periodically the negro's lucky numbers, 4-11-44, come
out on the slips of the alleged daily drawings, that are supposed to
be held in some far-off Western town, intense excitement reigns in
Thompson Street and along the Avenue, where someone is always the
winner. An immense impetus is given then to the bogus business that has
no existence outside of the cigar stores and candy shops where it hides
from the law, save in some cunning Bowery "broker's" back office, where
the slips are printed and the "winnings" apportioned daily with due
regard to the backer's interests.
It is a question whether "Africa" has been improved by the advent of
the Italian, with the tramp from the Mulberry Street Bend in his train.
The moral turpitude of Thompson Street has been notorious for years,
and the mingling of the three elements does not seem to have wrought
any change for the better. The borderland where the white and black
races meet in common debauch, the aptly-named black-and-tan saloon, has
never been debatable ground from a moral stand-point. It has always
been the worst of the desperately bad. Than this commingling of the
utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there
can be no greater abomination. Usually it is some foul cellar dive,
perhaps run by the political "leader" of the district, who is "in with"
the police. In any event it gathers to itself all the law-breakers
and all the human wrecks within reach. When a fight breaks out during
the dance a dozen razors are handy in as many boot-legs, and there is
always a job for the surgeon and the ambulance. The black "tough" is as
handy with the razor in a fight as his peaceably inclined brother is
with it in pursuit of his honest trade. As the Chinaman hides his knife
in his sleeve and the Italian his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro
goes to the ball with a razor in his boot-leg, and on occasion does
as much execution with it as both of the others together. More than
three-fourths of the business the police have with the colored people
in New York arises in the black-and-tan district, now no longer fairly
representative of their color.
[Illustration: A BLACK-AND-TAN DIVE IN "AFRICA."]
I have touched briefly upon such facts in the negro's life as may serve
to throw light on the social condition of his people in New York. If,
when the account is made up between the races, it shall be claimed that
he falls short of the result to be expected from twenty-five years of
freedom, it may be well to turn to the other side of the ledger and see
how much of the blame is borne by the prejudice and greed that have
kept him from rising under a burden of responsibility to which he could
hardly be equal. And in this view he may be seen to have advanced much
farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise, after all,
with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest of us, his white-skinned
fellow-citizens, had any right to expect.