“blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed, always
on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and is
surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is
permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have
something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt
administration, when public housing and public building projects were
reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in
Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed--for propaganda
purposes.
The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue
slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are
kept untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking
degradation forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.
The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more
imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological
advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed
slave-quarters area.
Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington, once
residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists,
now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.
In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are
not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy
minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no
law against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the
same restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld
proprietors who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme
Court decisions have gone otherwise elsewhere.
Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not
uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band
musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women
all over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls
for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is
considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes,
though, because of accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better
spots, these contacts are not evident in the better public gathering
places.
White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480
Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white
club admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band
leader.
It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men.
Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men
consorting with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.
A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue,
disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a
Texas physician.
Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white
girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a
colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same
U. S. agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night--and
paid him for it.
Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her home
in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored musician
named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the marijuana
from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white Washington
girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said they had
unnatural sex relations with him--they were afraid of pregnancy.
Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on
the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until
1949, the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either
whites or Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total
number of swimmers was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two
pools were set aside for colored and four for white. In 1949, when
there were no racial bars, total attendance dropped off to 332,000.
One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for most of the summer after
disturbances started when colored swimmers first attempted to use the
pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it completely.
It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and
toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed
about the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor
Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was
ended and the millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official
figures released a few days later showed attendance had skidded another
33 percent, down to a total of 220,000, of which--and get this--only
one-third were Negroes. In other words, whites had almost stopped using
the pools; on the other hand, there were barely more Negro patrons than
when the pools were restricted. Agitation was heard from tax-payers to
shut the pools, now run at a heavy loss to the city.
Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a
performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the
founding of the city was banned from the stage of a high school
auditorium because it had a mixed cast. The school board said:
“Congress makes the law and we enforce it.” There is a technical
question about whether a colored member of the board may visit white
schools, and vice versa.
Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and
whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket
restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and
sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment
in the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality
were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at
this writing has not been overruled.
But the lot of Negroes is enviable compared to that of their brethren
elsewhere. We called Chicago’s Bronzeville Black Paradise. But that was
before we saw Washington’s Negro Heaven.
The life of the Washington Negro is made pleasant by the force of many
circumstances. The odds are he is employed by the government, which
has raised salaries. If he doesn’t work for the government, he serves
government workers. He shares in the highest per capita earnings, yet
the cost of living in Washington is not so high as in New York and many
other large cities. All streets, in white sections or colored, are
broad and tree-lined.
No Negro is ever fired from a government job if it can possibly be
helped. When necessary to cut down a staff, the whites go first,
reversing the process of private business.
If they can’t do their work, whites are hired to do it over for
them. An instance, typical of thousands, occurred in the Bureau of
the Census, where five Negro women were so inefficient that their
department head requested permission to discharge them. His immediate
superior almost had a stroke.
“If Eleanor hears about this,” he gasped, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
Eleanor no longer lives in the White House. But she is still a potent
force in Washington, where her kitchen cabinet continues to rule the
nation that President Truman thinks he rules.
The upshot of the matter was that the section head was told to keep the
five colored women and to hire five white girls to do the work over for
them, on the night shift.
The same sort of favoritism is shown Negro job-holders and applicants
throughout the whole governmental set-up in the District. When a white
man wants to become a cop he takes a stiff civil service test and is
subject to a searching investigation. Most of the Negroes who have been
getting on the force recently did it on political pull.
Kid-glove handling of Negroes is the rule in every phase of Washington
life, in addition to favoritism in appointments to the public payroll.
Apparently no effort is made by the police and other public authorities
to enforce the liquor laws in the dark sections. The local Alcoholic
Beverage Control code provides that no one may be served while
standing. Bar customers must be seated on stools, and even then may be
served only beer and wines. Hard liquor may be consumed only at tables.
This is strictly enforced in resorts catering to whites. But almost
all colored saloons sell liquor openly over the bar, where drinkers
stand--as long as they can stand. Few attempts are made to restrict
gambling or policy-slip sales in the colored sections.
Almost 500 Negro after-hour clubs are running, most of them not even
bothering to get club charters. Thousands of Negro flats are operated
as blind pigs, where liquor, mostly gin, is sold openly to all comers
at all hours. None has a license, naturally.
Occasionally hokum raids are made and sometimes the defendants are
fined $25. Next day they are in business as usual. Honest policemen
are afraid to make too many pinches in Negro neighborhoods for fear
the pinkos will list them as “nigger-haters” and send their names up
above--maybe even to the White House. One cop whose name we will not
mention told us that one night after he pulled in a colored after-hour
spot, word came directly from the White House to the 13th precinct
station, in which the arrest had been made, to lay off. F.D.R. was
President then.
Despite the maudlin tears of reformers about the horrible conditions
existing in Washington’s “Negro Ghetto,” there are probably more new
Cadillac convertibles being driven from its doors than from any others.
Sleek, new, expensive convertibles of the flashier brands have become
the sine qua non of Negro policy-peddlers and reefer-pushers here,
as well as in all other major American cities. Respectable people are
returning to the old-fashioned closed models for fear their bankers
will wonder what they’ve been up to.
Yet, despite the flashy visible prosperity of Washington’s Negroes, a
disproportionate number are on public relief. Many draw dole and social
security checks under one name while gainfully employed at one or two
jobs under other names. This racket, invented for the residents of New
York’s Harlem and Little Puerto Rico, has been brought to its full
flower in Washington.
The humanitarians and the New Dealers, worrying about colored votes in
the northern states, help to put butterfat in the colored man’s milk
in the capital. If the colored man works it right, he can get a relief
check the first day he lands in Washington.
This story wasn’t published, but the federal agents who made the pinch
and compiled the record had carried it on their chests so long, they
ached to unburden it where it wouldn’t come back and bite them. When
they broke in on a Negro whom they suspected of selling narcotics,
he indignantly asserted, “You can’t arrest me. I am a friend of Mrs.
Roosevelt.”
To prove it, he brought out a couple of letters from the First Lady,
one of which was addressed “Dear Jim,” or “Joe,” stating she was sorry
to hear that his relief check had not arrived on time, and she would
see that he was not pushed around in the future--he shouldn’t worry.
The boys arrested him and got a conviction.
Mrs. Roosevelt, while in the White House and out, sincerely sought to
improve the position of Negroes everywhere. But sometimes her efforts
went to such extremes she hurt the cause. Once she made a reservation
for a small banquet party of sixty at the swank Hay-Adams House, across
the street from the White House. When the managers discovered it was to
be an interracial affair they cancelled it. On September 14, 1950, Mrs.
Roosevelt tried to register three Negroes in her party into the Willard
Hotel. She was staying elsewhere, with friends. The Willard refused.
White property-owners tremble at the financial danger that would result
should Negroes crash white residential areas.
But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,” developed
by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and
utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.
Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman
on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with
dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men
that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as
follows:
When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought
ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a
bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was
worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to
sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man
could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.
After the block-buster--in her own name--made the purchase, she and her
large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the
neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The
far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then
they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started
another Negro island in the city.
When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base
and repeated the process.
You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted
by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise
overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.
In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct
sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare.
In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same
street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush
shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares
high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive,
aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle
Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when
they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe
was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances
finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially
policemen.
Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight
to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:
Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive
Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a
patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central
Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous
Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States.
Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the
defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury,
former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed
him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an
effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who
usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every
election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and
murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He
is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited
by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian
proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long
Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven
$6,000 limousine.
William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first
Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of
Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee
on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie
was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations.
He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by
President Truman.
Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and
social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor
and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word
“nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not
found among whites--resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent
comer from the Southern plantations.
7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE
There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal
cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel
prize or is selected the rookie of the year.
We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring
facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable
names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted
centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s
Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.
That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by
people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or
Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the
identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then
is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on
the Caucasian population.
The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and
then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them.
That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding
of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.
Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress
racial references.
Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades
where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are
committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests
for Part One felonies--the more serious--in 1949 were as follows:
Colored males, 7,715.
Colored females, 1,085.
Total colored, 8,800.
White male, 2,396.
White female, 309.
Total white, 2,705.
Here is a breakdown on some:
Murder, colored 40; white 8.
Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1.
Rape, colored 140; white 23.
Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381.
Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.
Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s
children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of
the lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic
policy of visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.
Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important misdemeanors
showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.
Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the
people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later
chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.
The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes
in Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give
the full picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks,
especially if there is no white complainant. They have nothing to gain
by such a pinch; they merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the
gentle Negro.”
Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not
booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment
on the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the
inevitable discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or
left-wing judge.
If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional
hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:
Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse for
midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW,
with two occupants.
Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and
Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott,
colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection
with stolen auto hold-ups.
Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in
shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on
the front seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a
woman, who proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW,
who had been picked up by Scott.
Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but
the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver
of the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator
down to the floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton,
his head and shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel,
attempted to steer. It was impossible for either officer to jump or
let go. The stolen car finally collided with a barricade, ran over the
sidewalk.
With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still
struggling, the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed
collided with a tractor trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely
demolished.
Private Hamilton was killed.
Scott had a record which showed he had been committed eight times as a
juvenile delinquent on charges of larceny, and in 1943 was sentenced to
from two to five years for auto stealing. Thereafter he was involved in
six charges of robbery.
But the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to prosecute the Negroes and the
police were advised that if they insisted on going through with charges
before a judge, the DA’s office would nolle prosse the case, because
they did not believe “a conviction could be obtained” against colored
people who had so unfortunately become involved in the killing of a
policeman. But when a policeman kills a Negro in the line of duty, the
politically chosen District Attorney is frequently highpressured by the
N.A.A.C.P. into bringing murder charges.
We have pointed to the misguided tendency to minimize the size and
extent of the Negro population. If more than half of Washington’s
population is not black, the per capita crime rate is even more
appalling.
Like white crime, Negro crime is organized and syndicated. This does
not mean every rapist, hold-up man and car-thief takes orders from
above. But it means that when he gets in trouble he does seek certain
directed sources for bail-bonds, lawyers and fixers.
Policy-sellers, bookmakers’ runners, reefer peddlers and junk salesmen
are employed by an organization which protects them also.
The process, as it works here, will be described in detail in the
chapters devoted to crime and law enforcement, as it is part of the
general picture of organized evil.
In Washington, as in other cities, Negro crime on the consumer and
go-between levels is operated and controlled by Negroes. They report
to, kick back to, and make their fixes at upper levels with, white
criminals. The topmost control rests in the hands of the international
Syndicate, the Mafia, the Unione Siciliano. The Washington Negro
crime-ring has more autonomy than usual, because there are few
Sicilians and even fewer interested in crude crime. The national
Syndicate prefers not to show its bloody hands openly in the capital,
but lurks in the background--in New York, principally.
The most powerful Washington Negro is the aforementioned Puddin’ Head
Jones. Jim Yellow Roberts is the boss of dope and reefers. He makes his
buys in wholesale lots in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, direct
from the importers. While temporarily embarrassed by a jail sentence,
Roberts continued to run the Negro dope trade.
“Whitey” Simpkins is king of the Black Belt’s numbers racket. Johnny W.
Carter, who owns the Club Bali, a black-and-tan resort, is one of the
gamblers’ chiefs. Their payoff is a percentage which eventually reaches
the Syndicate through channels which will be set forth in detail in the
chapter devoted to dope and gambling in Washington.
One of Washington’s most important Negro underworld figures is Lamarr
(Polly) Brown who has been implicated in every form of illegality from
operating after-hour clubs to the sale of narcotics. Odessa Madre,
known as the “Queen of the Fences,” is just what her honorific implies.