Negro section is also laid out in NW. This part of town abounds with
colored flats where a white man may take a white or colored woman.
These holes sell gin without licenses, provide bedroom accommodations
for those who want them, and girls for those who don’t have them.
Many Negro cab-drivers pimp for white girls, first getting acquainted
with them when they pick them up as passengers. They set them up in
apartments, most of which are in NW, and sell their services to white
or colored men. These cabbies also handle reefers and after-hour liquor.
If you rode with us in Washington, through the NW colored section,
these are some of the things we could have shown you:
First, we parked our car at the corner of 10th and B Sts., in front of
the Lincoln Barbeque. We waited five minutes, a colored man came out of
the restaurant and took our order for bootleg liquor. It happened after
two, when the bars were closed. His prices were moderate, no more than
50 cents to a dollar above the established tariff. But the stuff was
moonshine and cut.
Let’s go to 1919 14th Street NW. This house was formerly the Star Dust
Club, an after-hour drinking and gambling place. Now it’s a shoeshine
parlor. It’s owned by William J. “Foots” Edwards, a notorious Negro
gambler. If you want a game, you can find stud in the basement.
The dark corner of 5th and K looks quiet and serene. The colored
damsels who parade past here singly and by twos are not. Stop your car
at the corner and they will come over and solicit you. Business all
night. If you’re a Negro you’ll know where to take them. If you are a
white man they’ll go along in your car to an alley or steer you to a
buggy rooming-house. Another corner frequented by dusky hustlers in
search of white trade is 9th and Rhode Island.
At about this time, we’ll run through the 7th Street district, which
is the Broadway of the NW Negro section, with the chief shops,
restaurants, night clubs and theatres. You can make pick-ups anywhere
around 7th, Georgia and Florida Avenues, but these streets are brightly
lighted, so most white men who want to change their luck play the
darker streets. And there it is not unusual to see white girls brace
black men.
In addition to sex on sale at the corner of 7th and Florida, you can
buy reefers or policy slips.
U Street, from 7th to 15th, is another bright light belt in the colored
section. The Dunbar Hotel and the Whitelaw are the swank Negro inns.
The Dunbar was once the aristocratic white Courtland Hotel. In its
basement is the 20-11 Club, one of the Nation’s best-known colored
cabarets, which caters to the cream of the colony and is patronized
also by white novelty-seekers. Rich and visiting Negro celebrities
check in at the Dunbar. So do Feds and cops, who have occasionally made
pinches there for narcotics and morals violations. In the 20-11 Club
you can pick up girls of any race.
On the corner of 7th and T are three hot spots--the Off Beat Club, for
musicians, the Club Harlem, and the Seventh and T Club. We saw them
serve drinks after hours and cater to fairies of all shades, female
white thrill-chasers and Negro reefer addicts.
Washington, like Chicago, is a city of alleys in every block of
residential property and many business squares, bisected by the rear
passages. As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark,
narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of
crap shooting and soliciting.
In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in
shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred
to--not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known
is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived
there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the
aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. But
it is inhabited by some of the lowest members of the Negro race in
Washington--and that means low.
Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the
13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are
annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable
size anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there--girls,
bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and
knives, articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past
the age of puberty.
A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be
there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children,
some sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby
in the carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s
diaper. A competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the
cokies merely as “Y.”
Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the
slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is
terribly tough, with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging
a minute and murders common. Close by the Negro sections of crime
and perversion is Ledroit Park, once surrounded by the mansions of
aristocracy. This is back of Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey
Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea.
Baseball lovers must travel through miles of dangerous streets to the
stadium.
Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its
kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the
world. Its internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among
these are great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro
assault cases go to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the
floors of its emergency wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are
frequent; shootings run second. Even on weekdays the place teems with
police interviewing victims.
Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in
assault cases.
One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central
Avenue--same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.
Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at 507
8th Street and E.
SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps
the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol
and runs through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this
neighborhood in some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself
you will be looking for something awful. But you will drive through
miles of wide avenues with deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish
and junk, of course. This homey residential section is reminiscent of
God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class sections in typical Southern
towns.
But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The
streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This
whole section is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or
woman’s life to walk there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are
not safe.
Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing,
prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find
his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming.
But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct
by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent
the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.
The main shopping and drinking boulevards of the SW Negro section are
4th and 7th Streets. Around here the Negroes moved into and drove out
what there was of a Jewish ghetto. The street where Al Jolson lived as
a child and where his father practiced as a cantor is now all Negro.
The SW dope peddlers and whores make their hangout on 6½th Street. The
chief madames are “Mamma Liz” and “Big Tit” Flossie.
We have indicated that many white women--especially government
workers--are receptive to sexual attentions of Negro men. But the
comparative ease with which a black man can get a white girl, even a
so-called respectable one, does not seem to deter colored men from
committing rape on women of their own race and whites.
As these lines were being written, all Washington was shocked and
alerted when a 22-year-old South American girl, visiting with a
diplomatic family, was stalked, attacked and ravished in a park near
Arlington Cemetery by a Negro, who, Tarzan-like, leaped from a clump of
trees entirely naked.
The popular form of Negro attack is mugging, a process in which the
assailant comes up behind a man or woman and throws his arm around the
victim’s throat, closing it sharply with the elbow out, and jabbing a
knee into the small of the back.
But in Washington colored people call it “yoking,” derivation of the
word unknown. It includes all forms of street assault. One process
consists of sneaking up behind a lone passer-by, usually one who
apparently has been drinking, and tapping him on the shoulder. As he
turns around, he is hit square on the jaw with a stiff arm, then kicked
in the groin when he falls. Most victims are robbed. But many young and
exuberant Negroes get up yoking parties just for the joy and excitement.
Three young colored boxers, aged 14, 16, and 17, terrorized Washington
a few months ago, committing at least 19 yoke robberies, netting more
than $2,000. The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 160-pound class
in last year’s Golden Gloves tournament. The youngest boxed at a boys’
club. The 16-year-old was a quarter finalist in the 135-pound class.
These activities are said to breed good citizens.
The three bet among themselves which would land the first punch on the
victim and whether it would be a knockout.
Police arrest hundreds of Negro yokers every year, most of them in
their teens. Thousands of yokings go unsolved. The yokers are usually
highly organized into juvenile gangs which fight also with home-made
pistols, sawed-off shotguns and switchblade knives.
Many of these young Negro gangs terrorize students, white and black, in
public schools, offering to sell them “protection” and punishing them
when they don’t pay up.
Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months
ago after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was
held for the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker
schoolboy of a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to
whip the younger boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to
the fact that all the schools in the city had this problem. According
to the assistant superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs
are made up of boys who aren’t in school and who aren’t working--mostly
from 16 to 21 years old.”
Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror
in every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk
about the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on
children who won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute
are told to steal from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they
have no other means of procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are
put on heroin and morphine by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a
life of serious crime.
Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous
religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from
behind and garroting him.
Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or 20
years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on
their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the
older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty
Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.
The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with
switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs.
All these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which
requires the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the
proceeds over to the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12
are “debs,” with full standing.
Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in Washington are
the following:
_Numbers and policy slips._ Almost all numbers sellers, even in white
neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and
women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans
get in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in
Washington. The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in
the chapter on gambling.
_Sale of reefers._ Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which
also is unique to Washington.
_Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level._ The
men, because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to
apartment buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These
thieves strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks
are sent out by the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security
benefits, pensions, army subsistence and similar regular allotments.
Those who do the manual stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks,
which are turned over to fences, often white, including storekeepers
and sometimes bankers.
Another Negro industry is _the sale of bootleg booze_. The rings
operate in many fashions. On some streets you find peddlers who sidle
up beside you, or come up to your car when you stop for traffic lights.
Many shoeshine “parlors” are moonshine dispensaries. Groceries and
poolrooms also sell, usually gin, but sometimes what is supposed to be
bourbon--corn for the Southern taste. The gin is mixed with cider to
dilute the taste of raw kerosene and the combination has a wallop.
That good old Negro money-raising institution, known as “the rent
party” elsewhere, has a specific, generic name in Washington, where
it’s called a “chitlin party.” Chitlins, hogs’ innards, are a delicacy
in some blacker parts of the South and are used here as a decoy
to attract guests to the homey brawls which are a regular part of
Blacktown’s social life. In New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville
the paying guest at a rent party gets nothing in exchange for his
contribution except the right to bring his woman, drink his gin, and
get into the fracas.
We met a white fellow who has run Washington’s chitlin industry up into
a million-dollar-a-year class. He gets the stuff from the butchers for
nothing. They’re almost willing to pay him to cart it away. Then he
packages it in 10-gallon jars which he sells for $2.50, or two bits a
gallon. That means the capital’s Negroes consume 4,000,000 gallons a
year.
These chapters were, of course, not in print when a young man known as
“The Sniper” was, for a few days, the most famous person in Washington.
If he were around now, our critics might have said we incited him. The
Sniper--a young white man--was a congenital Negro-hater. He boiled up
into an insane rage every time he saw a sable woman or man. He hid in
various sections and hit bullseyes from roofs, behind trees and through
open windows.
Before he was caught there was a wave of terror. For days Negroes
remained indoors. Crime sagged, because even the worst elements were
afraid to leave their homes.
Police Lieutenant Barrett, now Major and Superintendent of the
Metropolitan Force, got him after he had killed a half-dozen men and
wounded scores.
While the Sniper was in jail on suspicion, he met a drug addict, one
Richard Harlowe, and confided in him where he had hidden his gun, in
Baltimore. Barrett recovered it and came back to find his bird had
escaped. He was recaptured in Georgetown. Barrett’s fame helped him to
become the chief. His friends say it had nothing to do with the fact
that he was related to Major Edward Kelley, a previous chief.
8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES
Sam Wong, an owner of the China Clipper, Quonsett Inn, the Dragon and
other popular restaurants, was indicted on a $250,000 tax fraud. The
government charged he gave most of it to two blondes--sisters--who
lived with him. The case was tried in Baltimore. (_Note_: Though
Washington is the nation’s capital, it is merely part of the Maryland
Internal Revenue collection district.)
When the case was called, the courtroom filled with poker-faced
orientals. The government called some, the defense called others,
including Wong, whom it put on the stand.
But not one Chinese witness testified coherently. They gave their
names, addresses, and so on, muttered and mumbled irrelevant replies.
Even the defendant remained mute after being put on the stand by his
own attorney.
The lawyers had read _Chicago Confidential_, in which these reporters
revealed that Chinese will have no truck with American courts or
American law. So they gave a copy to the court and D.A., hoping the
judge and jury would realize the impossible position in which the
defense legal battery was placed. It did no good. Wong got a year. The
blondes weren’t Chinese--and they convicted him.
Some go to Chinatown for chop suey and chow mein. We will write about
those who seek other delicacies.
Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as
New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient,
pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed
Sadies.
Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning
in a block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all
neon-lighted restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants
and traders sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington
street with set-back buildings. If it weren’t for the garish Chinese
characters on the illuminated signs and windows, and the pale
yellow-faced men with sad old almond eyes sprawling on the stoops,
you’d think you were anywhere but in a Chinatown.
As in all Chinese quarters, various locations and various businesses
are divided between the tongs. Only two operate in the East, though
there are scores in California.
The On Leongs are dominant here, though not in the nation, through an
alliance with the Hip Sings, cemented many years ago, when they drove
the competing organizations back to the West Coast. Then they turned on
their ally. After a series of bloody wars, they established themselves
as the top dogs, with the Hip Sings the poor cousins.
The tongs are, primarily, trade and benevolent associations. Their
membership is comprised of certain families or immigrants from certain
villages in Canton. When the authorities clamped down on tong wars in
the 1930’s, the tongs began to enforce their decrees and decisions by
peaceful means, which include trade and social boycott.
According to members of the Chinese colony in Washington, there are
only 500 of them, but these figures are far out of line with our
count of at least 7,500. There are hundreds of Chinese restaurants
and laundries in the town. Chinese always underestimate their
population, as do Negroes. But with them there are more concrete
reasons. Three-fourths are entered illegally, through many subterfuges,
such as forged birth and marriage certificates, as well as actual
body-smuggling over the Mexican and Canadian borders and from the West
Indies. The price of entering a Chinese now is $5,000, as against a
modest $1,000 twenty years ago. The fee is paid the smugglers by the
Chinaman’s tong or family society, for whom he then works to pay it
off. Nowadays most of this illegal entry is by air.
Chinese are cagey at census time, because if the rolls show anywhere
near as many in the country as there are, the difference in numbers
between those here and the ones on record would be so startling, it
would cause an investigation and wholesale deportation. Another reason
is that they are on a gentlemen’s agreement quota basis with agents of
the Federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. When an agent
runs across a group of illegally-entered Chinese, he gets practical
about the whole matter.
If he turned them all up at once, he’d get a pat on the back from his
superior, then have to go on a new job next week. But if he reports
only one every two weeks, he doesn’t have to do another lick of work
for months. So the agent makes a deal with the head of the tong, who
delivers the unfortunate Chinese at set intervals, and thus everyone is
happy: the government because it gets the Chinese, the agent because he
can loaf, and the wealthy Chinese laundry and restaurant owners, who
are not suddenly faced with labor shortages.
Washington’s Chinatown is important beyond its numerical strength
because it acts as a lobby for Chinese all over the country, regardless
of tong affiliation, and for Chinese merchants and enterprises all over
the world. There are not enough Chinese voters in the country to enable
them to influence elections, but they make up for lack of numbers by
intelligence, ingenuity, wealth and Oriental cunning developed by
centuries of intrigue with no qualms of honor owed the white man.
Communists never overlook a trick. They quickly took advantage of the
Chinaman’s unique possibilities. Many Chinese are vulnerable because
they have relatives in the old country. Thus they are subject to
pressure. Many are technical law-breakers or illegal entrants, so the
Reds, with their influence in high places, can threaten effectively.
Chinese societies make swell “drops” for the transmission of messages
and intelligence, and are being used, an angle not yet brought out
publicly.
They’ll tell you it isn’t so, but some of the recent tong fighting is a
war between Nationalists and Communists.
Chinatown, only a few blocks from the White House, the Capitol and the
center of the business and commercial life, is a focal point for all,
whites as well as Orientals, visitors and natives. In this town, where
almost everything shutters by midnight, the Chinese propensity for
staying up all night and sleeping most of the day has brought about
several phenomena. Unless you are welcome at a bottle club, there is
no late place to go to in Washington except Chinatown. Most of the
restaurants there are open all night, selling food. More than a few
serve liquor after 2 A.M., if they know you, in a tea-pot.
There is hectic activity all evening. Most of the white bag-swinging
street-hustlers work the neighborhood. Any cab-driver will direct you
there if you ask him, “Where can I get a girl?” These self-sellers
usually ask $20, but will take what they can get. They go on duty at
around 8, and by 10 most have made arrangements. From 10 to about 1 or
2, the restaurants are taken over by respectable people, mostly young
couples who stop in for a bite of exotic food after the movies. After
1, when the tarts have completed their rounds, they come back again
for more trade. At this time the drunks who have been ejected from the
cocktail lounges and night clubs are transported wholesale by cab to
Chinatown. Many of the drivers have deals with certain girls and some
of these girls have deals with the Chinese restaurants they habitually
visit.
Many of the hookers hang out at the Mai Fong.
We could find no Chinese whores in Washington. The proportion of
Chinese women to men is one to ten. Any Oriental girl, no matter
how homely, can make an attractive marriage. Many Chinese men are
married to white women. There are no Chinese waitresses in the Chinese
restaurants, except an occasional relative of the owner; they are
whites. Few are for sale, but many will help get you one who is.