Washington Confidential 6 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 6Part 1 · GREEN PASTURES
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 6
Part 1 · GREEN PASTURES
MortimerEnglish
Agonized oratory through the decades has been banging against the walls of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given the precious privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.
And we will tell you why there will be no vote--Confidential.
If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr. Jones is a Negro.
We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish--there are more Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible figures.
There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south, north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.
Census figures are off the beam. They always lag in summing up minority races. Most of the migrant census-takers assume that they should help to make the picture as light as possible. If a Negro is not unmistakably black, he is encouraged, if he does not think of it himself, to be listed as a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a West Indian, a South American, Filipino, Indian, Mexican or even Eskimo; the blood of all these is sprinkled through many generations of admixture.
There is no way of calculating how many light-skinned citizens can and do “pass.” Some Negroes sleep in shifts in crowded premises, so that a count in the regular course would register about one-third of the true total. Many are house servants and these do not go into the tally where they are employed, nor are they home during the hours when enumerators call.
More Negroes than whites are police characters, as will be demonstrated. And as a rule members of the race are wary and suspicious of questioners from “the law.” Many census-takers deliberately duck more than superficial duties in predominantly dark districts, because they are confused and afraid after getting hostile receptions and responses.
But in Washington there is one indisputable check.
The District of Columbia has a single Jim Crow law, segregating Negroes and whites--in schools. When pupils are enrolled they must reveal their true race. There can be no tampering with these statistics.
And in the winter of 1950–51 there were registered the following in all public schools through all grades from elementary to teachers’ college:
Negroes, 47,807; whites, 46,080.
Broken down, these figures are even more definitive. There are more Negroes than is evidenced by the bare totals. Negroes, because of their economic outlook, do not keep their children in school as long as do whites. That is sharply proven by the enrollment in the senior high schools:
Negroes, 4,787; whites, 7,176.
But there are 10,146 colored children in junior high schools compared to 9,270 whites.
The attendance at parochial and private schools is minor. Washington has the largest per capita Negro Catholic population in the United States.
Even an excess of 10 per cent of whites in the grand total and allowing for unmarried government workers would still indicate a Negro majority over all, because of the earlier departure from school of Negro children, as shown above.
This reveals a startling metamorphosis in a ten-year period. In 1940 the school record showed 66,000 whites and 36,000 Negroes. Thus there has since been a decline of 20,000 white children and a rise of 12,000 Negro children. The over-all decline is due to removal of white families to suburbs.
Negroes lived in Washington before the first President chose the rolling land along the Potomac to bear his name. Slavery was legal in the capital until the emancipation. The population of Washington about doubled between 1860 and 1870. Much of this influx represented slaves who escaped from plantations and got through the Union lines during the Civil War. But the big swell came when thousands of ex-slaves, free and foot-loose for the first time in their lives, left the destroyed and deserted Dixie farms and headed for Washington, which was not only near Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, but which exercised a fascination for them because they felt safer near their savior and their demigod, Abraham Lincoln.
Until the middle 70’s, Washingtonians of all colors had home rule, elected their own officials under a territorial form of government similar to that now practiced in Alaska and Hawaii, where mayors, legislators, judges and other lower-level officials are elected. They sent a delegate to Congress.
Long before LaGuardia, Marcantonio, Ed Flynn and Ed Kelly found the formula of organizing Negroes into blocs which could be voted en masse to perpetuate control of left-wing and criminal political groups, that was old stuff in D.C., where it was invented by one “Boss” Shepherd in Washington, the first large city in the country where Negroes were allowed to vote, and where there were enough of them to throw any weight as citizens.
Washington had been a sewer of iniquity during the Civil War; when Shepherd took over control it turned infinitely worse. The stench asphyxiated the members of Congress, who were exposed to it so intimately, and they exercised a forgotten constitutional prerogative, “to exclusively govern the District.” The polling booths made swell bonfires.
As will be seen, however, under the unique voteless system, the Negroes now exercise far more power, and Puddin’ Head Jones is by common consent the “mayor” of Washington’s Black Belt. As we progress you will be let in on how that could come about.
Despite the high enrollment of Negro children in public schools where they enjoy facilities for education equal to white children, Negroes continue to have an illiteracy far above the full population. In 1942, illiteracy in the District was only 1 percent for all races, whereas the Negro group showed 4 percent. Weighing these figures against the proportions of population in 1942 would seem to indicate that the Negroes were about 15 times as illiterate as whites.
Much later figures are available, however. Only 4 percent of Washington’s white youths who took the Army’s mental tests in 1950 failed, but nearly 29 percent of the prospective colored recruits were turned back.
New York’s Harlem is self-contained. Though Chicago’s Bronzeville has gone over its borders and set up tributary colonies in other sections of the city, it is still the center of Negro life there and contains most of its colored population.
But Washington’s Black Belt is no belt at all. It is sprawled all over, infiltrating every mile and almost every block in sections which for 150 years were lily white.
In New York, when you refer to Harlem, everyone knows what part of town you’re talking about. Similarly, Bronzeville and Central Avenue have definite meanings in Chicago and Los Angeles. In Washington, you have no way of indicating Darktown, because the Negro section has no generic name and it isn’t a section. It is all of Washington.
What is occurring in Washington is happening on a lesser scale in large northern population centers, except probably Manhattan, where Harlem is geographically restrained by Columbia University and Central Park, though Puerto Ricans are generously overflowing its borders on both sides.
In Chicago, instead of being bound in black ghettos, Negroes have preempted many sections, including former residences of millionaires. They live along wide and vernal boulevards in once splendid apartments and luxurious private homes with greeneries, and in palaces of packers and pioneer pirates.
This process is being repeated in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and especially Philadelphia.
The South, with its restrictive practices against Negroes and its underpayment of them, is gradually being denuded of its cheap labor, which is drawn North.
The recent census showed the population of most metropolitan cities remained stable. But their suburbs, beyond city limits, increased in many from 50 to 100 percent or more. This growth of Suburbia was made by whites who left as Negroes came. That kept city populations in status quo.
The words used to paint the picture in Chicago may be repeated in Washington, but with emphasis and re-emphasis. Here they took mile after mile of fine old dwellings on wide, tree-lined streets. And they also overran the slums. But Washington, despite the anguished yelps of the do-gooders, long was and now is practically slum-free.
Some rookery regions are on F St. and New Jersey Ave. near the Union Station and Capitol. But there are poor whites living in hovels equally depressed. On the other hand, 95 per cent of the Negroes live in lodgings as good as and better than most white residents’. Negroes have taken over most of the desirable blocks near the government offices and downtown.
We have before us an article on “The Negro in Washington,” in a recent issue of Holiday magazine, a slick-paper, 50-cent pleader for leftist causes, published, curiously enough, by the staid, rich and conservative house of Curtis, owners of the Saturday Evening Post. This effusion is illustrated with four pages purporting to show the Negro’s treatment in Democracy’s capital, which the editors call a “democratic contradiction.” There are photographs of Negro children at play in cluttered backyards which are called typical of the city’s overcrowded Negro slums. Another picture shows a Negro woman in an alley dwelling; another is captioned, “Capitol Dome presents a contrast of obvious irony to the Negro slums which it overshadows. Overcrowding, dirt and disease are all prevalent.”
Your authors traveled up and down 1,000 miles of streets and boulevards, 404 of alleys, not once but a dozen times. They saw the slums illustrated in Holiday magazine, but they saw few others, because there are few others. At the most, 20,000, of a total of 400,000 Negroes, live in these “slums,” which, even at their worst, are turreted castles compared to the degraded dwellings in which Negroes and myriad whites are forced to live in New York.
Holiday did not print one picture showing the thousands of fine homes and small apartment buildings in which most of Washington’s Negroes live.
Cup your ear and we’ll let you into a little secret about these “slums.” Whether you read Holiday or not, you’ve seen the pictures, because they are the ones which are always used by Reds and Pinks to point up to the world how gruesomely America treats its dark step-children. The reason you’ve seen these pictures--always with the Capitol dome in the background--is that there are no others available.
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the chief propagandists who exploited this “blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed, always on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and is surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt administration, when public housing and public building projects were reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed--for propaganda purposes.
The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are kept untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking degradation forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.
The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed slave-quarters area.
Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington, once residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists, now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.
In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no law against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the same restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld proprietors who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme Court decisions have gone otherwise elsewhere.
Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women all over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes, though, because of accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better spots, these contacts are not evident in the better public gathering places.
White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480 Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white club admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band leader.
It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men. Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men consorting with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.
A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue, disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a Texas physician.
Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same U. S. agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night--and paid him for it.
Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her home in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored musician named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the marijuana from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white Washington girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said they had unnatural sex relations with him--they were afraid of pregnancy.
Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until 1949, the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either whites or Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total number of swimmers was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two pools were set aside for colored and four for white. In 1949, when there were no racial bars, total attendance dropped off to 332,000. One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for most of the summer after disturbances started when colored swimmers first attempted to use the pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it completely.
It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed about the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was ended and the millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official figures released a few days later showed attendance had skidded another 33 percent, down to a total of 220,000, of which--and get this--only one-third were Negroes. In other words, whites had almost stopped using the pools; on the other hand, there were barely more Negro patrons than when the pools were restricted. Agitation was heard from tax-payers to shut the pools, now run at a heavy loss to the city.
Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the founding of the city was banned from the stage of a high school auditorium because it had a mixed cast. The school board said: “Congress makes the law and we enforce it.” There is a technical question about whether a colored member of the board may visit white schools, and vice versa.
Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment in the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at this writing has not been overruled.
But the lot of Negroes is enviable compared to that of their brethren elsewhere. We called Chicago’s Bronzeville Black Paradise. But that was before we saw Washington’s Negro Heaven.
The life of the Washington Negro is made pleasant by the force of many circumstances. The odds are he is employed by the government, which has raised salaries. If he doesn’t work for the government, he serves government workers. He shares in the highest per capita earnings, yet the cost of living in Washington is not so high as in New York and many other large cities. All streets, in white sections or colored, are broad and tree-lined.
No Negro is ever fired from a government job if it can possibly be helped. When necessary to cut down a staff, the whites go first, reversing the process of private business.
If they can’t do their work, whites are hired to do it over for them. An instance, typical of thousands, occurred in the Bureau of the Census, where five Negro women were so inefficient that their department head requested permission to discharge them. His immediate superior almost had a stroke.
“If Eleanor hears about this,” he gasped, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
Eleanor no longer lives in the White House. But she is still a potent force in Washington, where her kitchen cabinet continues to rule the nation that President Truman thinks he rules.
The upshot of the matter was that the section head was told to keep the five colored women and to hire five white girls to do the work over for them, on the night shift.
The same sort of favoritism is shown Negro job-holders and applicants throughout the whole governmental set-up in the District. When a white man wants to become a cop he takes a stiff civil service test and is subject to a searching investigation. Most of the Negroes who have been getting on the force recently did it on political pull.
Kid-glove handling of Negroes is the rule in every phase of Washington life, in addition to favoritism in appointments to the public payroll.
Apparently no effort is made by the police and other public authorities to enforce the liquor laws in the dark sections. The local Alcoholic Beverage Control code provides that no one may be served while standing. Bar customers must be seated on stools, and even then may be served only beer and wines. Hard liquor may be consumed only at tables. This is strictly enforced in resorts catering to whites. But almost all colored saloons sell liquor openly over the bar, where drinkers stand--as long as they can stand. Few attempts are made to restrict gambling or policy-slip sales in the colored sections.
Almost 500 Negro after-hour clubs are running, most of them not even bothering to get club charters. Thousands of Negro flats are operated as blind pigs, where liquor, mostly gin, is sold openly to all comers at all hours. None has a license, naturally.
Occasionally hokum raids are made and sometimes the defendants are fined $25. Next day they are in business as usual. Honest policemen are afraid to make too many pinches in Negro neighborhoods for fear the pinkos will list them as “nigger-haters” and send their names up above--maybe even to the White House. One cop whose name we will not mention told us that one night after he pulled in a colored after-hour spot, word came directly from the White House to the 13th precinct station, in which the arrest had been made, to lay off. F.D.R. was President then.
Despite the maudlin tears of reformers about the horrible conditions existing in Washington’s “Negro Ghetto,” there are probably more new Cadillac convertibles being driven from its doors than from any others. Sleek, new, expensive convertibles of the flashier brands have become the sine qua non of Negro policy-peddlers and reefer-pushers here, as well as in all other major American cities. Respectable people are returning to the old-fashioned closed models for fear their bankers will wonder what they’ve been up to.
Yet, despite the flashy visible prosperity of Washington’s Negroes, a disproportionate number are on public relief. Many draw dole and social security checks under one name while gainfully employed at one or two jobs under other names. This racket, invented for the residents of New York’s Harlem and Little Puerto Rico, has been brought to its full flower in Washington.
The humanitarians and the New Dealers, worrying about colored votes in the northern states, help to put butterfat in the colored man’s milk in the capital. If the colored man works it right, he can get a relief check the first day he lands in Washington.
This story wasn’t published, but the federal agents who made the pinch and compiled the record had carried it on their chests so long, they ached to unburden it where it wouldn’t come back and bite them. When they broke in on a Negro whom they suspected of selling narcotics, he indignantly asserted, “You can’t arrest me. I am a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt.”
To prove it, he brought out a couple of letters from the First Lady, one of which was addressed “Dear Jim,” or “Joe,” stating she was sorry to hear that his relief check had not arrived on time, and she would see that he was not pushed around in the future--he shouldn’t worry. The boys arrested him and got a conviction.
Mrs. Roosevelt, while in the White House and out, sincerely sought to improve the position of Negroes everywhere. But sometimes her efforts went to such extremes she hurt the cause. Once she made a reservation for a small banquet party of sixty at the swank Hay-Adams House, across the street from the White House. When the managers discovered it was to be an interracial affair they cancelled it. On September 14, 1950, Mrs. Roosevelt tried to register three Negroes in her party into the Willard Hotel. She was staying elsewhere, with friends. The Willard refused.
White property-owners tremble at the financial danger that would result should Negroes crash white residential areas.
But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,” developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.
Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as follows:
When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.
After the block-buster--in her own name--made the purchase, she and her large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started another Negro island in the city.
When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base and repeated the process.
You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.
In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare. In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive, aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially policemen.
Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:
Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States. Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury, former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven $6,000 limousine.
William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations. He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by President Truman.
Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word “nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not found among whites--resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent comer from the Southern plantations.
