THE ASSIMILATION OF RACES
One of the unique, if not the one unique, American problem has been that
of assimilating great masses of nearly all the important races of the
earth. As far as European and Asiatic races are concerned the question
of absorption into the American nation has been largely an urban one.
More and more the assimilation of the negro also is becoming an urban
problem, for the migration of negroes to the towns and cities is a
significant part of the general movement of the population cityward. The
Census of 1910 showed that more than one-fourth of the negro population
now dwells in towns of 2,500 population and over. Thirty-nine cities
have ten thousand or more negroes; five northern and seven southern
cities have more than forty thousand negroes each. Negroes are not only
moving to the cities, but the Census further shows that in each of
twenty-seven large cities, negroes form one-fourth or more of the total
population and in four cities they constitute one-half the population.
On one side the question of assimilation of all races in the cities is a
labor problem: one of employment, a living wage, proper housing, and
industrial opportunity. On the other, it is a social problem: one of
education, recreation, common counsel, investigation, publicity, and
protection. It is with the social aspects of assimilation that we shall
deal in this chapter.
INVESTIGATIONS
As a preparation for constructive work with them, women first studied
the needs, customs, and labor of foreigners as well as they knew how.
Louise Montgomery’s investigation of “Old Country Mothers and American
Daughters” in the stockyards district of Chicago is an excellent example
of such study. It is thus reviewed by Christina Merriman:
It is a remarkably comprehensive, balanced and interesting survey
that Miss Montgomery has made, of the industrial and educational
problems of a district torn by the struggle between the inherited
standards of the European peasants and those of their American
daughters, “struggling to keep up with American standards” and
making every effort to avoid being classed as a “foreigner.” The
same problem concerns every American city which has a foreign
industrial community.
The study is based on the records of 900 families known to the
University of Chicago Settlement for a number of years, and from
which was selected a group of 500 girls from whom it was possible to
secure the most reliable information.
Taken all in all, it is an indictment of an educational system which
fails to provide a practical education for these restless young
daughters, and of an industrial system which permits their
employment in industries where they “grow dull with a routine that
calls for no exercise of brain power, and where the general
stupidity of which many employers complain is increased as the
months go by.”
Miss Montgomery contends that the labor of girls under sixteen is
not necessary to the continuation of any business, and, as a
buttress for her position, quotes one of the largest employers of
child labor as saying: “If we could not by law employ the girl under
sixteen years, we should find some way to make the machine do her
work,” and points to the frank declaration of another, that: “As an
employer, I can and do make money out of the work of little girls.
As a man, I know it would be better for them and for the state if I
were forbidden by law to employ them.”
The author, however, recognizes the problems of constantly changing
and inefficient employees with which the employer is faced, and
records their “growing sentiment against the employment of
children.”
She tells us of the girl who was so “sot” in her mind and so well
satisfied with what she was doing that she insisted that “pasting
labels was her trade and refused to consider anything else”; while
an example of the other type of mind is cited in one of three girls
who had held eleven “jobs” in fifteen months, and gave as her excuse
for one change: “The new boss may have red hair. Anything to change
the scenery!”
The report points out again the well-worn but vital problem of
providing normal amusement for the young girl, “carrying the
premature responsibility of the wage-earner and asserting her right
to a feverish search for evening pleasures,” and urges the city,
through the Board of Education, to provide more nearly adequate
uncommercialized recreation.
While the study is, of course, of a specialized class and of a
community with specialized problems, it includes such a keen and
sympathetic analysis of the complex factors which influence the
relations between the employer and the child worker as to make it an
extremely valuable record.[28]
The Jewish immigrant girl in Chicago was studied by Viola Paradise of
the Immigrants’ Protective League and her conclusion about the girl
whose problems and ideals she has come to know at first hand is this:
Perhaps no other immigrant is so eager to become Americanized as the
Jewish girl, and with no other nationality does the Americanizing
process begin so soon, and continue so consciously. This is not only
because she feels that it is financially advantageous to know the
language and customs of her adopted country, but because,
notwithstanding the much famed “individualism” of the Jew, there is
ingrained in her nature a passion for conformity. She is quick to
accept the conventional; she is willing to be better than her
neighbor, but she dreads being different. This is of course more or
less true of all people, and this is one reason why the Jewish girl
accepts so readily the habits and standards of Americans about her.
She wants to equip herself with what the American takes for granted,
American fashions, American methods, and the language. Having caught
up, as it were, with her environment, she is ready to give free rein
to her individualistic tendencies.
Perhaps at no time of her adult life is the immigrant girl more
impressionable, more sensitive to suggestion, than during her first
few months in America. She is in a state of self-consciousness which
is propitious or detrimental, as circumstances determine. American
life can mold her as it will. She brings as her gifts to America
strength, youth, and enthusiasm, an eager and curious mind, longings
and ideals, gifts which should be accepted less carelessly and used
less wastefully. In exchange should we not give her something better
than long, hard hours, low wages, unhealthful homes and
neighborhoods, dangerous and vicious recreations? Should we not make
an effort to justify and realize her boundless faith in America?[29]
Mary Antin, too, has helped Americans to see the immigration problem as
a “vivid human experience.” She says of the Jewish girl: “Such girls as
these know Socialism as the only savior in their distress, since their
only reading has been literature of a Socialistic nature. They do not
realize that although Socialism is one of the agencies for working out
our national problem, it is being supplemented by the aid and interest
of many societies like the Consumers’ League, which are trying to
emphasize the fact that liberty means liberty for all; not liberty to
exist, but to live, to enjoy, to develop.”[30]
Interesting studies have been made by women of the various nationalities
that come to our shores in an effort to interpret them to our people.
“Our Slavic Fellow Citizens” by Emily Green Balch and “Little Citizens”
by Myra Kelly are among the most successful of them. In addition to
these descriptive studies, Anna A. Plass and others have prepared
textbooks for the foreigners to help them, in turn, interpret Americans.
“Civics for Americans in the Making” by Miss Plass is an attempt to
teach English with citizenship.
A LITERACY TEST
Kate Holladay Claghorn, of the New York School of Philanthropy, who has
given special study to the problem, believes that one of the first aids
to the proper assimilation of the alien would be a literacy test
designed to exclude many non-assimilable elements. Her reasons are thus
set forth in an article in _The Survey_:
Any substantial advance in the solution of the immigration problem
must be looked for through legislation, since private activity, no
matter how devoted or extended it is, can be expected to make but
little impression upon a social group constantly augmented at the
rate of from half a million to a million a year.
What new legislation is most needed? From the federal government the
establishment of a literacy test, not for the purpose of restricting
immigration but for the protection of the immigrant. The true value
of a literacy test to secure protection has been observed by making
use of it as a subterfuge to bring about restriction. But it should
really be regarded as perhaps the best wholesale measure of
protection that could be devised.
It has been abundantly shown that the bulk of the immigrant’s own
burden and our burden because of him are due not to viciousness or
abnormality of any sort, but to sheer helplessness. He is
exploitable raw material, and he is exploited, and held, until he
can push out of it, at a low grade of living detrimental to him and
to the community. And the one effective measure to help the helpless
is to bring them to a condition in which they can protect
themselves.
The immigrant who has learned to read and write has gained control
of the tool that brings him out of the stone age, with all its
associated habits, into the age of bronze, where we live and work
today. This may be only his own native language—as required by the
bill which was vetoed last year—but through it he is at least
brought into an immensely wider circle of communication than is
afforded by word of mouth only, so that he need not be at the mercy
of the nearest rascal who wants to take advantage of his ignorance.
Having this, he is helped a long stage on the way of acquiring the
use of the more effective tool—reading and writing the English
language, which would be our next demand for him. For this we should
ask state legislation, establishing compulsory education for
non-English speaking adults (immigrant or otherwise).
The expense of such an undertaking should not be urged against it,
for expense should be measured in relation to return, and, measured
in this way, this particular expense would be found a profitable
investment, as every citizen properly prepared for citizenship is an
asset to the state. The original purpose of public education in this
country was to perform this very task.
Does not the adult immigrant need this preparation much more than
the native-born child, whose traditions, home surroundings and
social advantages can supply many deficiencies in formal education?
Every state where foreign labor is massed in camps or colonies
should require the establishment of schools in those places. Such
schools would not only bring their own appropriate benefit, but
would serve an equally useful purpose in banishing the evil spirits
of mischief and disorder that infest places where the normal social
influences are hindered in their free play.
If it be objected that school attendance could not be secured on
account of the length of working hours, the obvious answer is that
hours of labor which shut out all opportunity for exercise of the
mental faculties or the social instincts, are thereby shown to be
too long and should be reduced.
Should these two requirements be met, we need no longer be troubled
whether immigration is heavy or light. Whether few or many, we
should have in our immigrants an intelligent working force who can
help develop our country, and for whom we may be grateful and of
whom we may be proud.
PROTECTIVE WORK
Miss Frances Kellor was one of the leading American women, outside the
settlements, to take hold of the protective work for immigrants. After
studying for some time the destinations of immigrants, and organizing
workers to do follow-up work among foreign women, she became head of the
New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Miss Kellor has
accomplished many definite results in her work for immigrants, notably
their better treatment at the hands of employment agents. She has
written much that is pointed on the subject of assimilation and some of
the problems involved.
Miss Kellor is also actively directing the work of the North American
Civic League for Immigrants which was formed to teach law and order to
immigrants, on the one hand, while it also protects them as far as it
can from swindlers. This League is an organization of men and women with
branches in seaboard cities where women are among the number of special
agents who meet steamers and aid immigrants, especially women, in
various ways. Mrs. Rudolph Blankenburg of Philadelphia has been greatly
interested in the work of the League and she secured the coöperation,
for the Philadelphia branch, of women’s aid societies and various civic
bodies.
In Providence, Rhode Island, Mrs. E. Haight, the headworker of Sprague
House, whose neighbors are largely Italians, has arranged for the North
American Civic League for Immigrants to conduct an information bureau
and English class, and is also working out a plan for boys’ work there.
There are over 40,000 Italians in this colony and no other provision for
even a modicum of assimilation of the foreign element into American
life.
The New York-New Jersey Committee of the League was organized in 1909
for the purpose of developing permanent city, state, and federal
policies regarding conditions created by immigration. Experiments have
been tried since then and as soon as a successful policy of meeting
conditions has been demonstrated, some private enterprise, or the city,
state or federal government, has been urged to pursue the same policy.
The necessity of definite systems of protection, education,
distribution, and assimilation has been continually urged by the League
upon public authorities.
The women of the League have experimented in the field of education,
first in Buffalo and later in other cities. In these cities, hundreds of
foreign-born housewives have been taught domestic science in their own
homes. They have been taken to markets and taught to buy wisely; young
members of the family have been reached as well as the mother. Domestic
education among the foreign women has thus supplemented the work of the
schools in such a way as to secure the coöperation of parents and
teachers in the nurture and protection of their children in the new
country. In order to avoid the stigma of charity, women promoters of
this domestic education have been asking Boards of Education to assume
responsibility for the same.
Begun in Buffalo, domestic education has now extended to New York and
Rochester; to Mineville, a mining community of 3,000; to Barren Island,
New Jersey, an industrial community of 1,400; a canners’ camp at Albion,
New York; and an aqueduct labor camp at Valhalla. Three distinct types
of cities and four distinct types of isolated communities were thus
tried and the results, it is felt, amply justify the expenditure of time
and effort.
The North American Civic League for Immigrants supported for some time
in Rochester a Bureau of Information and Protection for Foreigners,
which was the creation originally of Florence Cross (now Mrs. Kitchelt),
a social worker among the Italians there. Miss Cross explained the need
of this bureau in this way:
“There are in Rochester a large number of foreign-born inhabitants who
are ignorant of our civic institutions, ignorant of the laws of
sanitation and hygiene, ignorant of the protection offered them by our
laws and our various philanthropic institutions. Except through the
influence of their children in the schools, many of these adult
foreigners have little opportunity to understand those municipal
activities which are intended to help rather than to punish. Many of
them know nothing of the Public Health Association, the Legal Aid
Protection Committee, the Provident Loan Association, the evening
schools and similar well-established agencies for reaching just such
needs as theirs.
“Therefore this bureau was established on a modest scale as a clearing
house to bring inquirers to the people who can assist them. The rooms
are open every afternoon and evening, where foreigners who are in any
kind of trouble or perplexity may come for advice. During four months
when the bureau was first opened, the callers averaged 71 per day.”
This bureau received reports from the New York office of the Civic
League for Immigrants about all newly arrived immigrant children whose
destination was Rochester. The children were located on their arrival
and their names sent to the School Census Board. Among these, a number
of cases of child labor have been found and reported. Several positions
for men out of work have also been found. Leaflets on tuberculosis have
been distributed and cases, when discovered, sent to the proper
authorities. A pure milk station has been maintained at the bureau and
its other activities have included the preparation of Italian dances for
the National Playground Congress; a series of articles contributed to
the Italian press on living standards, health, duties of citizens,
school laws, savings banks, honest elections and similar topics; and a
suggestion made to the City Club, which was adopted, that a Fourth of
July banquet be tendered the newly naturalized citizens of Rochester.
The Rochester Bureau came most prominently before the public during the
directorship of Miss Cross while a strike of Italian laborers was going
on in Rochester. The story of this strike illustrates fundamental
elements in the work of assimilation. The Italian laborers’ union some
nine years previously had succeeded in getting a wage increase. The
increased cost of living in the meantime had made their wage inadequate
for a decent standard of living, so the union gave contractors a six
months’ notice of its demand for a second increase. The demand was
ignored and the strike commenced. Mr. Kitchelt thus relates the story:
Newspapers began their campaign then. Those who had blamed the
Italians for their low standard of living now criticized them for
trying to improve it by the only means in their power. The chief of
police held a conference with the contractors, and groups of
strikers were attacked by the police.
Some men were shot and others arrested. The cases of the latter were
twice postponed in spite of their desire for a speedy trial and they
were finally discharged for lack of evidence. The strikers appealed
to the mayor to try to effect a settlement and several conferences
were held in his office. But he was himself a contractor and the
results were not apparent. Arbitration through Italian lawyers was
tried but with no success.
In this extremity some of the strikers’ executive board turned to
the Bureau for help. Miss Cross called together a committee of
prominent citizens and had the men tell them their story. It was
shown that the wages of the laborers averaged $6.50 a week, an
amount inadequate to maintain a family in health and strength; that
the city was being injured by a continually lowering standard of
living; that the injection into the community of irresponsible
strike-breakers was a menace to the public peace and welfare.
The newspapers were induced to print the truth about the strikers.
Public sentiment gradually changed in favor of the workmen.
Petitions from residents and shop-keepers along the torn-up streets
were laid before the mayor. After a strike of four weeks, the
contractors consented to a conference which resulted in an immediate
increase of one cent an hour and an agreement to arbitrate the wage
scale before the next season’s contracts were entered into.
Among the various national associations which aid the immigrant directly
and indirectly is the Council of Jewish Women, organized primarily to
aid Jewish immigrants to adapt themselves to American conditions of life
and labor. It has sections in all the larger cities and towns, with a
central system of organization whereby rapid coöperation is secured
among the sections in times of need.
The Council of Jewish Women seeks, through the promotion of better
housing, labor conditions, recreation, education, health conditions,
vocational guidance, travelers’ aid, probation and other protective work
and institutional care, to throw about Jewish women those safeguards
which will make of them creditable citizens in as short a time as
possible and prevent their becoming the public burdens, delinquents,
insane, and paupers which modern competitive labor conditions all too
readily tend to make of them.
The real test of the sincere desire of Jew and Gentile to live together
in helpful coöperation is demonstrated by the mutual appreciation which
the Council of Jewish Women and the Federation of Women’s Clubs show for
each other’s social services. The National Child Labor Committee, the
Consumers’ League, legislative committees, and charitable organizations
all testify to the helpfulness and efficiency of the Council of Jewish
Women.
Like the Y. W. C. A., the Council of Jewish Women is a religious
organization but owing to its peculiar relation to the problem of
immigration it is forced to take a more decided position on the
fundamental labor question than the former organization.
At the Sixth Triennial Convention of the Council, Miss Sadie American
made a statement which indicates the serious spirit of this organization
as far as the white slave traffic is concerned:
This brings me to the subject of the White Slave Traffic, upon which
Resolutions were passed by your Executive Committee and sent to your
Sections (which in response sent many letters praising the action),
which Resolution instructed your officers to do their utmost to
combat this traffic, especially to combat against such Jews as might
be in it. It was in pursuance of this Resolution and the urgent
invitation of the English Society for the Protection of Girls and
Women, of which Mr. Claude Montefiore is the President, that I was
sent to represent you to the Jewish White Slave Traffic Conference
in London and to the International White Slave Traffic Conference in
Madrid, and I believe that in this act alone the Council of Jewish
Women justified its existence. It is impossible in a meeting such as
this to go into details.
The English Association had expected only nine or ten people. There
were twenty-eight delegates from nine countries, and an attendance
from England that was surprising. These delegates were men and women
of highest importance not only in philanthropic but in the financial
and larger social world of Europe. Does not this prove the
importance of the subject?
The men of America have not yet waked up on this subject. Jewish
men, unless they leave a call for themselves, are going to be waked
up in a way they will not like.
I take credit to the Council of Jewish Women that it has fearlessly
taken a stand on this matter, as it is the duty of Jewish women to
do what they can to protect the good name of the Jewess.
To go to those meetings and to listen was horror enough in itself,
to realize that the things there told were true is increased horror,
to see the victims is horror still more horrible, and only those who
have given days and nights to this subject can know its full
meaning.
When I was sent to England I thought that I had some information. I
learned many things I would prefer not to have had the duty of
knowing.
It had been left to my discretion whether it would be worth while to
go to Madrid, but this decision was practically taken out of my
hands in London when, upon talking with the European men and women
who had attended other international conferences, I became convinced
there could be no doubt as to its being a duty to go.
It is a matter of surprise to the leading Jewish men in Europe who
are so actively interested in this matter to find that the Council
of Jewish Women has stood alone for so long in this work, that the
Council of Jewish Women was the only one of the organizations of
Jews in the United States which thought the matter of sufficient
importance to send a delegate to confer with those of Europe on the
subject.
ATTITUDE OF SETTLEMENTS
At the Inter-city Conference of Settlement Workers in Boston last year
it became very clear that some of the leaders were anxious to make their
work among foreigners count for more. Dr. Jane Robbins took the position
that assimilation would be expedited and rendered more stable by means
of the training of young foreigners, Italians and the like, as social
workers in order that they might contribute their own enthusiasm and
knowledge of the traditions and prejudices of their people to the task
of Americanization. Miss Lillian Wald, the president of the National
Federation of Settlements, maintained that the best assimilative work of
all could be done through the settlement which she called “The House of
the Interpreter.” The inculcation of the neighborhood spirit, she added,
stimulates a wholesome rivalry and promotes better housing and social
standards than can be secured by other means. Vida Scudder insisted upon
the vital necessity of rescuing settlement work from philanthropic
tendencies. She suggested that truer democracy and helpfulness in the
work of assimilation of all elements of the national life could be
brought about by greater attention on the part of settlements to all the
forward movements of the working class for whom settlements exist. Miss
Scudder argued that settlement workers ought to perfect the technique of
the settlement organization in such a way that they would be free in
times of crises to assist in all working class movements which have as
their aim the improvement of the conditions of life and labor. In this
position, Miss Scudder would sympathize with and encourage work along
lines similar to that pursued by Miss Cross in her Rochester work, to
which we have referred.
THE NEGRO
The problem of fair citizenship for the negro is receiving no little
attention from those women interested in the assimilation of races. The
National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes is an organization of
men and women with headquarters in New York, formed “to help in
counteracting this migration to the cities and to make efforts for
improving the serious social conditions growing up among the negroes in
the cities.”
This League is a consolidation of the National League for the Protection
of Colored Women formed in 1906, after revelations were made of the
abuses in the employment agencies connected with the emigration of negro
women from the South, and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial
Conditions of Negroes, in New York, which recognized the industrial and
educational handicaps of the negro and sought to equip him better for
life.
The consolidated body is making studies of negroes in cities, seeking to
secure wider recreational, educational, and industrial facilities, and,
what is perhaps most important of all, training negro social workers to
do themselves the needed work for their own race. Among the effective
women workers in this organization is Elizabeth Walton.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also a
body of men and women. It seeks to secure for the negroes “full
enjoyment of their rights as citizens, justice in all courts, and
equality of opportunity everywhere.” Among the women who are earnest
supporters of this society are Miss Mary White Ovington of Brooklyn,
Jane Addams of Chicago, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Miss Lillian Wald and Mrs.
Max Morgenthau of New York. Miss May Childs Nerney is the secretary.
It is to a woman, Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, that we owe one of our
best brief studies of the colored people’s problems in a great northern
city. Her article published in The Survey, entitled, “The Colored People
of Chicago: Where Their Opportunity Is Choked—Where Open,” is such a
trenchant presentation of this problem that it deserves quotation at
length here. She says:
In the course of an investigation recently made by the Juvenile
Protective Association of Chicago into the condition of boys in the
County Jail, the association was much startled by the
disproportionate number of colored boys and young men there.
Although the colored people of Chicago approximate one-fortieth of
the entire population, one-eighth of the boys and young men, and
nearly one-third of the girls and young women, who had been confined
in the jail during the year, were negroes.
The Association had previously been impressed with the fact that
most of the maids employed in houses of prostitution were colored
girls and that many employment agencies quite openly sent them
there, although they would not take the risk of sending a white girl
to a place where, if she was forced into a life of prostitution, the
agency would be liable to a charge of pandering.
In an attempt to ascertain the causes which would account for a
greater amount of delinquency among colored boys and for the public
opinion which so carelessly places the virtue of a colored girl in
jeopardy, the Juvenile Protective Association found itself involved
in a study of the industrial and social status of the colored people
of Chicago.
While the morality of every young person is closely bound up with
that of his family and his immediate environment, this is especially
true of the sons and daughters of colored families who, because they
continually find the door of opportunity shut in their faces, are
more easily forced back into their early environment, however
vicious it may have been. The enterprising young people in immigrant
families who have passed through the public schools and are earning
good wages continually succeed in moving their entire households
into more prosperous neighborhoods where they gradually lose all
trace of their early tenement house experiences. On the contrary,
the colored young people, however ambitious, find it extremely
difficult to move their families or even themselves into desirable
parts of the city and to make friends in these surroundings.
Although no separate schools have ever been established in Chicago,
it was found that many colored young people become discouraged in
regard to a “high school education” because of the tendency of
employers who use colored persons at all in their business to assign
to them the most menial labor.
Many a case on record in the Juvenile Protective Association tells a
tale of an educated young negro who failed to find employment as
stenographer, bookkeeper or clerk. One rather pathetic story is that
of a boy graduated from a technical high school last spring. He was
sent with other graduates of his class to a big electric company
where in the presence of all his classmates he was told that
“niggers are not wanted here.”
The Association has on record another instance where a graduate of a
business college was refused a position under similar circumstances.
This young man, in response to an advertisement, went to a large firm to
ask for a position as clerk. “We take colored help only as laborers,” he
was told by the manager of a firm supposed to be friendly to the
negroes.
All the leading business colleges in Chicago, except one, frankly
discriminate against negro students. The one friendly school at present,
among twelve hundred white students, has only two colored students, but
its records show as many as thirty colored students in the past,
although the manager claims that his business has suffered in
consequence of his friendliness to the negro.
After an ambitious boy has been refused employment again and again in
the larger mercantile and industrial establishments and comes to the
conclusion that there is no use in trying to get a decent job, he is in
a very dangerous state of mind. Idle and discouraged, his neighborhood
environment vicious, such a boy quickly shows the first symptoms of
delinquency. Even the superintendent of the Illinois Industrial School
for Boys at St. Charles complains that it is not worth while to teach
trades to colored boys in his institution because it is so very
difficult for a skilled colored man to secure employment. The colored
people themselves believe that the employers object to treating the
colored man with the respect which a skilled mechanic would command. As
a result of this attitude, the colored laborer is being driven to lower
kinds of occupation which are gradually being discarded by the white
men.
Certainly the investigators found that the great corporations, for one
reason or another, refused to employ negroes. Department stores, express
companies and the public utility companies employ very few colored
people. Out of the 3,795 men employed in Chicago by the eight leading
express companies, only twenty-one were colored men. Fifteen of these
were porters.
The investigators found no colored men employed as boot-and-shoe-makers,
glove-makers, bindery workers, garment workers in factories, cigar box
makers, elevated railroad employees, neckwear workers, suspender-makers
or printers. No colored women are employed in dress-making, cap-making,
lingerie and corset-making. The two reasons given for this
non-employment by the employers are: first, the refusal of the white
employees to work with colored people; second, the “colored help” is
slower and not so efficient as the white. Some employers solve the
latter difficulty by paying the colored help less. In the laundries, for
instance, where colored people do the same work as white people, the
latter average a dollar a week more.
The effect of these restrictions upon negroes is, first, that they are
crowded into undesirable and underpaid occupations. As an example, about
12 per cent. of the colored men in Chicago work in saloons and
poolrooms. Second, there is greater competition in a limited field with
consequent tendency to lower the already low wages. Third, the colored
women are forced to go to work to help earn the family living. This
occurs so universally as to affect the entire family and social life of
the negro colony.
A large number of negroes are employed on the railroads, largely due to
the influence of the Pullman Palace Car Company. There is a tradition
among colored people that Mr. Pullman inserted a clause in his will
urging the company to employ colored men on trains whenever possible,
but while the investigators found 1,849 Pullman porters living in
Chicago, they counted 7,625 colored men working in saloons and
poolrooms. There is also a high percentage employed in theaters; more
than one-fourth of all the employees in the leading theaters of Chicago
are colored.
The federal government has always been a large employer of colored
labor; 9 per cent. of the force in all the federal departments are
negroes. In Chicago the percentage of colored men is higher. Out of a
total of 8,012 men, 755 are colored, being 10.61 per cent. of the whole,
approximately their just share in proportion to the population. The
negroes, however, do not fare so well in local government. A study made
of the city departments in Chicago showed the percentage of colored
employees to be 1.87 per cent.; in Cook County, 1.88 per cent. Three
colored men have also been elected as county commissioners, and there is
said to be no instance on record in Chicago of a negro office-holder
having betrayed his trust.
The investigators found, in regard to the colored men in business: (1)
that the greater number of their enterprises are the outgrowth of
domestic and personal service occupations; (2) that they are in branches
of business which call for small capital and little previous experience.
In the colored belt on the South Side of Chicago a number of business
houses are managed by colored people. There is also one bank located in
a fine building, of which a colored man is president, but 80 per cent.
of the depositors are white. According to the evidence confirmed by the
figures of the United States census, there is little possibility for a
colored business man to make a living solely from the patronage of his
own people. The census report holds that he succeeds in business only
when two-thirds of his customers are white. This affords another
explanation of the fact that most of his business is of such a character
that a white man is willing to patronize it—barber shops, expressing,
restaurants, and other occupations suggesting personal service.
There is a large proportion of real estate dealers among colored men,
many of whom do business with white people, the negro dealer often
becoming the agent for houses which the white dealers refuse to handle.
Colored people are eager to own their homes and many of them are buying
small houses, divided into two flats, living in one and collecting rent
from the other. The contract system prevails in Chicago, making it
possible for a man with two or three hundred dollars for the first
payment to enter into a contract for the purchase of a piece of
property, the deed being held by the real estate man until the purchaser
pays the amount stipulated in the contract.
The largest district in Chicago in which colored people have resided for
a number of years is the section on the South Side, known as the “black
belt” which includes a segregated vice district. In this so-called
“belt” the number of children is remarkably small, forming only a little
more than one-tenth of the population, and an investigation made by the
School of Civics showed that only 26 per cent. of the houses in the
South Side and 36 per cent. of the houses in the West Side colored
district, were in good repair. Colored tenants reported that they found
it impossible to persuade their landlords either to make the necessary
repairs or to release them from their contracts, but that it was so hard
to find places in which to live that they were forced to endure
insanitary conditions.
High rents among the colored people, as everywhere else, force the
families to take in lodgers. Nearly one-third of the population in the
district investigated on the South Side and one-seventh of the
population in the district investigated on the West Side were lodgers.
This practice is always found dangerous to family life; it is
particularly so to the boys and girls of colored families who, because
they so often live near the vice districts, are obliged to have the
house filled with “floaters” of a very undesirable class, so that the
children witness all kinds of offenses against decency within the home
as well as on the streets. [Similar conditions exist in some of the
colored districts of New York City.]
It was found that the rent paid by a negro is appreciably higher than
that paid by any other nationality. In a flat building formerly occupied
by white people, the white families paid a rent of twelve dollars for a
six-room apartment for which a negro family is now paying sixteen
dollars; a white family paid seventeen dollars for an apartment of seven
rooms for which the negroes are now paying twenty dollars.
The negro real estate dealer frequently offers to the owner of an
apartment house, which is no longer renting advantageously to white
tenants, cash payment for a year’s lease on the property, thus
guaranteeing the owner against loss, and then he fills the building with
colored tenants. It is said, however, that the agent does not put out
the white tenants unless he can get 10 per cent. more from the colored
people. By this method the negroes now occupy many large apartment
buildings but the negro real estate agents obtain the reputation of
exploiting their own race.
When it becomes possible for the colored people of a better class to buy
property in a good neighborhood, so that they may take care of their
children and live respectably, there are often protest meetings among
the white people in the vicinity and sometimes even riots. A striking
example of the latter occurred recently on the West Side of Chicago; a
colored woman bought a lot near a small park upon which she built a
cottage. It was not until she moved into the completed house that the
neighbors discovered that a colored family had acquired property there.
They immediately began a crusade of insults and threats. When this
brought no results, a “night raid” company was organized. In the middle
of the night a masked band broke into the house, told the family to keep
quiet or they would be murdered; then they tore down the newly built
house, destroying everything in it. This is, of course, an extreme
instance, but there have been many similar cases. Recently in a suburb
of Chicago, animosity against negro residents resulted in the
organization of an anti-negro committee, which requested the dismissal
of all negroes who were employed in the town as gardeners, janitors,
etc., because the necessity of housing their families depressed real
estate values.
Supplementary to the previous housing investigations, the Juvenile
Protective Association studied the conditions of fifty of the better
homes occupied by the colored people of Chicago, those in the so-called
“black belts” in the city, those in a suburban district and other houses
situated in blocks in which only one or two colored families lived. The
size of the houses varied from five to fourteen rooms, averaging eight
rooms each. The conditions of the houses inside and out compared
favorably with similar houses occupied by white families.
Classified according to occupation, the heads of the household in nine
cases were railroad porters, the next largest number were janitors, then
waiters, but among them were found lawyers, clergymen and physicians. In
only four instances was the woman of the house working outside the home.
Only four of the homes took in lodgers and children were found in only
fifteen out of the fifty families studied.
The total of thirty-three children found in the fifty homes averages but
two-thirds of a child for each family and but for one family—a janitor
living in a ten-room house and possessing eight children—the average
would have been but half a child for a family. This confirms the
statement often made that while the poorer colored people in the
agricultural districts of the South, like the poor Italians in rural
Italy, have very large families, when they move to the city and become
more prosperous, the birth rate among colored people falls below that of
the average prosperous American family.
From the homes situated in white neighborhoods, only two reported
“indignation meetings when they moved in” and added “quiet now.” One
other reported “No affiliation with white neighbors”; another “White
neighbors visit in time of sickness” and the third was able to say
“Neighbors friendly.” Of the ownership of the fifty homes, thirty-five
were owned by colored men, twelve by white landlords and the ownership
of three was not ascertained. Thirty-four of the houses were occupied by
their owners.
According to the Juvenile Protective Association records, it was found
that out of one hundred poor families, eighty-six of the women went out
to work. Though there is no doubt that this number is abnormally high,
it is always easier for a colored woman to find work than it is for a
man, partly because white people have the traditions of colored servants
and partly because there is a steadier demand for and a smaller supply
of household workers, wash and scrub women, than there is for the kind
of unskilled work done by men. Even here they are discriminated against
and although many are employed in highly respectable families, there is
a tendency to engage them in low-class hotels and other places where
white women do not care to go.
Investigators found from consultation with the principals of the schools
largely attended by colored children that they are irregular in
attendance and often tardy; that they are eager to leave school at an
early age, although in one school where there is a great deal of manual
work this tendency is less pronounced.
Colored children more than any others are kept at home to care for
younger members of the family while the mother is away at work. A
persistent violation of the compulsory education law recently tried in
the Juvenile Court disclosed the fact that a colored brother and sister
had been refused admittance in a day nursery, the old woman who cared
for the little household for twenty-five cents a day was ill, and the
mother had been obliged to keep the older children at home in order to
retain her place in a laundry. At the best the school attendance of her
five children had been most unsatisfactory, for she left home every
morning at half-past six, and the illiterate old woman in charge of the
children took little interest in school. The lack of home training and
the fact that many colored families are obliged to live in or near the
vice districts perhaps accounts for the indifference to all school
interests on the part of many colored children, although this complaint
is not made of those in the high schools who come from more prosperous
families.
The most striking difference in the health of the colored children
compared to that of the white children in the same neighborhood was the
larger proportion of the cases of rickets, due of course to malnutrition
and neglect. The colored people themselves believe the school
authorities are more interested in a school whose patronage is
predominantly white.
It was found that young colored girls, like the boys, often become
desperately discouraged in their efforts to find employment other than
domestic or personal service. Highschool girls of refined appearance,
after looking for weeks, will find nothing open to them in department
stores, office buildings, or manufacturing establishments, save a few
positions as maids placed in the women’s waiting rooms. Such girls find
it continually assumed by the employment agencies to whom they apply for
positions that they are willing to serve as domestics in low-class
hotels and disreputable houses. Of course the agency does not explain
the character of the place to which it sends the girl, but going to one
address after another the girl herself finds that the places are all of
one kind.
Recently an intelligent colored girl who had kept a careful record of
her experiences with three employment agencies came to the office of the
Juvenile Protective Association to see what might be done to protect
colored girls less experienced and self-reliant than herself against
similar temptations. Another young colored girl who, at the age of
fifteen, had been sent to a house of prostitution by an employment
agency, was rescued from the house, treated in a hospital and sent to
her sister in a western state. She there married a respectable man and
is now living in a little home “almost paid for.”
The case of Eliza M., who has worked as cook in a disreputable house for
ten years, is that of a woman forced into vicious surroundings. In
addition to her wages of five dollars a week and food which she is
permitted to take home every evening to her family, she has been able to
save her generous “tips” for the education of her three children for
whom she is very ambitious.
Colored young women who are manicurists and hair dressers find it
continually assumed that they will be willing to go to hotels under
compromising conditions and when a decent girl refuses to go, she is
told that that is all that she can expect. There is no doubt that the
few colored girls who find positions as stenographers or bookkeepers are
much more open to insult than white girls in similar positions.
All these experiences tend to discourage the young people from that
“education” which their parents so eagerly desire for them and also
makes it extremely difficult for them to maintain their standards of
self-respect.
In spite of various efforts on the part of colored people themselves to
found homes for dependent and semi-delinquent colored children the
accommodations are totally inadequate, which is the more remarkable as
the public records all give a high percentage of negro criminals. In
Chicago the police department gives 7.7 per cent., the Juvenile Court
6.5 per cent., the county jail 10 per cent.
Those familiar with the police and the courts believe that negroes are
often arrested on excuses too flimsy to hold a white man, that any negro
who happens to be near the scene of a crime or disorder is promptly
arrested and often convicted on evidence upon which a white man would be
discharged. Certainly the Juvenile Protective Association has on record
cases in which a negro has been arrested without sufficient cause and
convicted on inadequate evidence. A certain type of policeman, of
juryman, and of prosecuting attorney has apparently no scruples in
sending a “nigger up the road” on mere suspicion.
There is the record in the files of the Association of the case of
George W., a colored boy, nineteen years old, who was born in Chicago
and who had attended the public schools through one year at high school.
He lived with his mother and had worked steadily for three years as a
porter in a large grocery store, when one day he was arrested on a
charge of rape.
In the late afternoon of that day a woman eighty-three years old was
assaulted by a negro and was saved from the horrible attack only by the
timely arrival of her daughter, who so frightened the assailant that he
jumped out of a window. Two days later George was arrested, charged with
the crime. At the police station he was not allowed to sleep, was
beaten, cuffed and kicked, and finally, battered and frightened, he
confessed that he had committed the crime.
When he appeared in court, his lawyer advised him to plead guilty,
although the boy explained that he had not committed the crime and had
confessed simply because he was forced to do so. The evidence against
him was so flimsy that the judge referred to it in his instructions to
the jury. The state’s attorney had failed to establish the ownership of
the cap dropped by the fleeing assailant and the time of the attempted
act was changed during the testimony. The description given by the
people who saw the colored man running away did not correspond to
George’s appearance. Nevertheless the jury brought in a verdict of
guilty and the judge sentenced the boy to fourteen years in the
penitentiary. When one of the men who had seen the guilty man running
away from the old woman’s house was asked why he did not make his
testimony more explicit, he replied, “Oh, well, he’s only a nigger
anyway.”
The case was brought to the Juvenile Protective Association by the
employer of George W., who, convinced of the boy’s good character, felt
that he had not had a fair trial. The Association, finding that the boy
could absolutely prove an alibi at the time of the crime, is making
every effort to get him out of the penitentiary.
As remedies against the unjust discrimination against the colored man
suspected of crime, a leading attorney of the race in Chicago suggests
that:
Generalizing against the negro should cease. The fact that one negro
is bad should not fix criminality upon the race. The race should be
judged by its best as well as by its worst types.
The public press never associates the nationality of a criminal so
markedly in its account of crime as in the case of a negro. This
exception is most unjust and harmful and should not obtain.
The negro should not be made the universal scapegoat. When a crime
is committed, the slightest pretext starts the rumor of a “negro
suspect” and flaming headlines prejudice the public mind long after
the white criminal is found.
The investigators were convinced that there are not enough places in
Chicago where negro children may find wholesome amusement. Of the
fifteen small parks and playgrounds with field houses, only two are
really utilized by colored children. They avoid the others because
of friction and difficulty which they constantly encounter with
white children. The commercial amusements found in the neighborhoods
of colored people are the lowest type of poolrooms and saloons,
which are disproportionately numerous because so many young colored
men find their first employment in these two occupations, and with
their experience and very little capital are able to start places
for themselves.
All colored people are especially fond of music, but almost the only
outlet the young people find for their musical taste is in
vaudeville shows, amusement parks, and inferior types of theaters.
That which should be a great source of inspiration tends to pull
them down, as their love of pleasure, lacking innocent expression,
draws them toward the vice districts where alone the color line
disappears.
An effort was recently made by some colored people on the South Side
to start a model dance hall. The white people of the vicinity,
assuming that it would be an objectionable place, successfully
opposed it as a public nuisance and this effort toward better
recreational facilities had to be abandoned.
In suggesting remedies for this state of affairs, the broken family
life, the surroundings of a vicious neighborhood, the dearth of
adequate employment, the lack of preventive institutional care and
proper recreation for negro youth, the Juvenile Protective
Association finds itself confronted with the situation stated at the
beginning of the investigation—that the life of the colored boy and
girl is so circumscribed on every hand by race limitations that they
can be helped only as the entire colored population in Chicago is
understood and fairly treated.
For many years Chicago, keeping to the tradition of its early
history, had the reputation among colored people of according them
fair treatment. Even now it is free from the outward signs of
“segregation,” but unless the city realizes more fully than it does
at present the great injustice which discrimination against any
class of citizens entails, it will suffer for this indifference in
an ever-increasing number of idle and criminal youths, which must
eventually vitiate both the black and white citizenship of Chicago.
CLUB WORK
Of the local work of women’s associations in behalf of better
opportunities for the alien, the reports are too numerous for the barest
mention. Only an example or two may be cited by way of illustration.
Pittsburgh, the city second to Chicago as a distributing center for
immigrants, has many individuals and organizations alive to the problem
of assimilation. The Y. M. C. A. and the Civic Club of Allegheny County
have coöperated to establish a foreign immigration distributing station
at the railway depot and will do follow-up work with the new residents
of that city. In this work these two organizations will have the
coöperation of the Council of Jewish Women and other important social
agencies in the city.
The Education Committee of the Civic Club arranged conferences in
Pittsburgh on the Americanization of foreign-born families, frankly
accepting Miss Kellor’s program: “The State should take up, at the point
where the Federal government lays aside its responsibility, the real
question of immigration, which is the problem of making the immigrant
into a good citizen, protecting him when he is looking for a job and
helping him to go to the part of the state where he is most needed,
where the best conditions exist, where there is the best standard of
living and where he may find congenial associates.”
Evening classes for foreigners were also undertaken by this club, and
its women members worked hard at that enterprise until the Board of
Education decided to assume responsibility for it.
All over the state of Pennsylvania thoughtful women are turning
seriously to the question of the alien in their midst. _The American
Club Woman_ reports that “the immigration problem is regarded as very
important by Mrs. Samuel Semple, State President of Pennsylvania Clubs.
She has traveled all over the state and observed the vast throngs of
foreign immigrants pouring into the industries. She urges a special
effort to educate the immigrant into a good citizen. The establishment
of social centers in the schools is the first step advocated.” “Women
inspectors at every port where immigrants land is a much needed reform.
The Civic Club of Philadelphia has made a study of immigrant stations
and finds that there is no adequate provision for the proper handling of
women and children, and that no privacy is allowed, and that women are
frequently subjected to embarrassment and distress because of being
entirely at the mercy of male inspectors.”
In Boston, the Women’s Municipal League is a center for all agencies,
including that of the League, which are working for the assimilation of
the foreign elements in the community. We are told that “it has also
reached the point when it can develop, within the League, a plan to
unify all the educational activities of every department until no vital
interest in home or school or social life is left untouched; a plan
which shall include the emigrant woman and thus become the basis of a
genuine democracy.”
In California, the women like many men are beginning to wrestle with the
immigration problem, which has been augmented already by the opening of
the Panama Canal and which will, unless proper safeguards are at once
set up, produce the evil conditions in the western seaports and western
cities that now exist in the eastern ports and other cities.
The Women’s Civic League of Baltimore has made a serious effort to
secure adequate protection for the immigrants that come in such numbers
to that city.
COMMISSIONS
The Women’s Municipal League of New York formed in 1906 a Research
Committee which made an intensive study of a group of immigrants and
reported the need of better public protection. As a result of the
pressure exerted by this Committee, the League itself, and the
Association of Neighborhood Workers, a state immigration bill was passed
in 1908 creating a non-salaried commission of nine members. Miss Frances
Kellor, who had directed the research work among immigrants, was made a
member of this commission and later became head of the State Bureau of
Immigration.
Massachusetts followed with a Commission of Immigration on the lines of
the New York commission, for a study of internal assimilation. Grace
Abbott, director of the Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago, was
appointed executive secretary.
Governor Johnson recently appointed a similar commission in California
and Mrs. Mary E. Gibson is an active member.
FUNDAMENTALS
Of the work of Jane Addams of Chicago in the foreign colonies the very
best tribute is that paid her by one of her alien neighbors: “It was
that word _with_ from Jane Addams,” said a working woman, “that took the
bitterness out of my life. For if she wanted to work with me and I could
work with her, it gave my life new meaning and hope.”
Starting in with a simple desire for service to our new citizens,
sometimes enlivened by real missionary fervor and again by a
semi-religious and philanthropic sentiment, women social workers are now
realizing to a gratifying extent that the real basis of assimilation is
economic, because the immigrant comes here as a worker. To prevent
exploitation thus becomes the main endeavor of a large group of workers
in the foreign colonies, and their emphasis on good wages as a basis for
housing reform and other standards of living as well as for social
opportunity and culture proves the capacity of women for intellectual
growth and keenness of penetration. Sometimes in their anxiety to make
good citizens of foreigners, women workers among them, or for them, lay
emphasis on governmental action and are paternalistic in that they work
for legislation more than education among the workers themselves.
Others, while not underestimating the value of legislation, feel that
exploitation will be more permanently removed or prevented by educating
the immigrant to demand those conditions of life and labor for himself
or herself which will make exploitation impossible.