sight must be a great factor in Negro crime, since, among Negroes, it is not the children with the homes so much as those without homes who fall into crime.

The Negro child has in the North a greater opportunity for reformation than in the South. Juvenile Courts are well established in all the Northern cities, and the juvenile offender is not treated like the adult criminal. The result can be seen in the frequent reclamation of Negro boys and girls. Some of the reform schools, however, do not give the Negro boys and girls full opportunity to learn the trades they desire. As the head of the Glen Mills (Pa.) school, which is one of the best in the country, said to the writer, "Negro boys do not have opportunity to follow mechanical trades in the North, hence they are not taught them." This I believe to be based upon an erroneous assumption as to the Negro's industrial opportunity, and of course makes against the Negro delinquents. For example, a large proportion of the Negro boys at Glen Mills are put on the farm, but the opportunities of the Negro farmers in the North are even fewer than those of the Negro mechanics. Besides, most of the Negro boys are from the city, and farming does not appeal to them as a mechanical trade would. In another reform school in Pennsylvania, Negro boys are given better opportunities. One even learned to be a linotype operator-a trade more firmly closed to Negroes than any other mechanical trade-but three months after his release he was earning $18.00 per week, and he was not twenty-one years old. This boy was allowed to follow his bent; had he been forced to the farm or obliged to become a waiter, on the theory that Negroes have no opportunity as linotype operators, he might have been lost.

CRIMINAL ENVIRONMENT

One of the causes for the large amount of crime among Negroes is the city environment. A large portion of the Negroes in large cities live in the worst parts of our cities, and do not have the protection which should be afforded the immigrant in a large city. In Philadelphia and Chicago the latter notoriously-the portion of the city where vice is most largely segregated and presumably protected, is that in which large bodies of ignorant and poor Negroes live. To be sure, the resorts of vice-saloons, gambling houses, houses of prostitutionare not all conducted by Negroes, nor, indeed, chiefly for Negroes, but their presence is tolerated by Negroes. For example, in Chicago on Dearborn Street, between Nineteenth and Twenty-second Streets, much of the vice of that great city is segregated, and is conducted largely by whites. But here large numbers of Negroes live, and the cause of

their presence in the neighborhood is not their native depravity as much as economic necessity.

It is well known that, in the places of vice, money is spent extravagantly. It is also well known that the untrained Negro in the city cannot be choice about the job he takes; but being primarily an unskilled laborer, he must frequently take only that job which others do not care for. Many find their way as waiters, porters, and domestics in these places of crime and vice, where they earn frequently twice as much as they would elsewhere.

Then comes the question of housing. Those who work in these undesirable places, find it to their economic advantage to live in the place where they work, or as near it as possible. Furthermore, others are attracted to the neighborhood because of the cheapness of rent. All decent people, who can afford it, move out, and the place is left to the poor and unskilled, who are the easiest prey for this unsavory environment. Thus many who might escape the criminal life are led into it by the economic condition which practically forces them into criminal environment.

Then there is the low standard of American municipal politics, which everywhere affects the Negro. Powerful political organizations, in their eagerness to rule, debauch both the Negro and the foreigner. With the former, they take advantage of the economic stress, and permit the Negro who can control votes to run a gambling house, a bawdy house, or saloon, and he soon learns to thrive on the immunity from conviction offered by the political machine. In fact, in many of our large cities, the chief politicians among Negroes are saloon keepers and others who are in doubtful occupations. The practical debarring of the Negro from labor organizations and competition in mechanical and clerical occupations, makes members of the race the easy prey of corrupt white politicians. Again, the political machine, through its contractor bosses, furnishes a large number of Negroes with legitimate work, such as garbage hauling, street cleaning, traction work, and sewer work. But while this work is perfectly honorable, it is done by men of comparatively low intelligence, who are easily controlled by division and precinct bosses, and who spend much of their earnings in the saloons run by ward politicians.

Another cause of crime, and especially of juvenile crime, is the economic necessity for the absence of both parents from home during the day, thus leaving the children without any oversight. In the large cities, there is a large proportion of Negro families in which the father and husband cannot alone support the family, and therefore the mother must work. This is true to a greater extent among Negroes than

among whites, for in the Census of 1900 there were 40 per cent of Negro married women in gainful occupations as against 11 per cent of white married women. The hours of these Negro women must also be taken into account. They do not work in the stores or factories, where they have a definite number of hours; but they are in domestic service, as cooks and cleaners, and frequently must leave home two hours before breakfast and return late in the night. As an illustration of the facts in the case, the writer personally examined several schools of Negroes in which the percentage of tardiness was much higher than the average, with the following results: In one school in the Seventh Ward, Philadelphia, in the first and second grades-children averaging from 7 to 8 years old-41 out of 210, or 19.5 per cent, reported having no father; 24, or 11 per cent, had no mother: 12, or 5.7 per cent, had neither father or mother. Of the 174 children who had mothers, 114, or 65 per cent, were left by their mothers early in the morning, and on their return home from school found their mothers away, as they were working out. In other words, in this school 150 children out of 210 had no motherly care during the day, and all these children are under nine years of age. Of the children in the higher grades, third and fourth, a still larger per cent had neither father nor mother, and were without proper parental care after school hours. In another school in a neighborhood in which the Negroes are considered better off, of 108 pupils in all grades, 19 had no mother, 22 had no father. Of the 89 who had mothers, 46 of the mothers were working out. That is, in this school, 64 out of 108 children, or 59 per cent, had no maternal oversight during the day.

Fully half of the Negroes in Northern cities are lodgers. In all of these cities the proportion of young people is large; in all of them, except Pittsburg and Chicago, the number of males is less than females. The economic stress is such that many people are forced to take lodgers, and ask no questions as to their conduct. The sexes are thrown together in these lodging houses in such a way as to often invite sexual crime, and one is indeed surprised that the number of such crimes is really so small.

The effect of race prejudice on the crime of the Negro, I am unable to discuss, except to say, that in so far as race prejudice acts so as to prevent Negroes from entering higher and more lucrative positions, it acts to keep Negroes in that economic group which feels the hard side of life most, and from which the great mass of criminals, white and black, is recruited. Nor am I prepared to affirm that there are any peculiar tendencies to crime among Negroes, which cannot be traced to general economic and social conditions. The Negro criminal

is, as a rule, accidental and occasional, and is the result more of neglect than of inherent criminal tendencies. Education has usually brought a higher efficiency and a better economic position, the educated man being able, not only to earn more but to spend to better advantage. The result is that very few educated Negroes are ever convicted of crime, fewer, I think, than whites. At present the educated Negroes' philosophy of life has more of the hopeful than of the pessimistic, and this has deterred them from many of the crimes frequently associated with education.

From the above discussion, there are several important deductions: First, Negro arrests are not increasing out of proportion to the Negro population. As arrests represent an exaggerated picture of the crimes of the community, the probability is that there is proportionately less crime to-day in Northern cities than ten years ago. The general impression as to the increase of crime among Negroes in the North is, I think, erroneous. It is based largely upon the reports in the newspapers, which do the Negroes serious injustice.' Second, there is still, however, a great difference between the proportion of Negroes arrested and the proportion of Negroes in the general population. This is a reflection of the economic condition of Negroes as compared with that of the community as a whole. While this condition is slightly improving, it is far below the normal.

Third, the chief hope of cutting down the amount of crime lies in opening up larger economic opportunity for Negroes in the North. This is being done largely by the influx of Negroes to these centers, making it necessary for members of their group to cater to their wants. Thus have developed Negro professional and business men, as shown in a former article. These are the leaders of the race and create a kind of group control which makes for better social conditions.

See Occasional Paper No. 20, Starr Centre, Philadelphia, "The Negro and the Newspaper," by R. R. Wright, Jr.

I

JOHNSON OF HAMPTON

BY EDWARD L. CHICHESTER

N order to give some idea of the work done at Hampton Institute,

it is customary to refer to the school's record and point to the fact

that many educational leaders (a list headed by the name of Booker T. Washington) have gone out from Hampton; that the school has sent out so many tradesmen and farmers; that a certain number of its girls are homekeepers, and so on, with a long list of telling figures; but to give an idea of the peculiar quality of its work is not so easy. This work is unobtrusive in the doing and its most significant results do not lend themselves readily to analysis or tabulation.

About four years ago I was going through the dairy and saw a tall, awkward looking Negro washing milk cans. I asked his name. "Johnson." I asked him where he was from, and, straightening himself he looked at me in a bewildered way and answered, "Alabama." "What did you do at home?"

up,

"I worked with my father on the farm."

"Did your father own his place?"

"No, he didn't own anything, but," brightening up, "he's made the first payment on a home since I came here to school."

The boy's influence had told. Hope and ambition had come to that black laborer down in Alabama because his son had sent in a report of a new and broader outlook for his people. A year or two after this I was in the Grand Central Station in New York, and saw this same youth clutching his baggage and looking about him in a bewildered way. A man he had expected to meet, who would take him across the city, was not on hand.

"How did you happen to be in New York?" I asked.

He told me that he had been working through the summer with a dairy farmer in Connecticut, and was on his way to Hampton. "Did you like the work?"

"Yes, and he wants me to come back next year."

Progress again. This boy was desired. Slow, unpolished, unprepossessing, if you will, but desired where he had worked. Some progress was being made here toward the solution of the Negro problem.

Note: This sketch has appeared in the Utica Press, the Boston Transcript, and the Youth's Companion.