Meanwhile the entire district had been aroused, and a meeting called for the evening of July 12, in front of a church at Seventy-sixth Street and St. Lawrence Avenue. About 1,000 people gathered for this meeting, which was conducted by the presidents of the South Park Manor and Wakeford Improvement Associations. The former announced that he had visited the Daily News and learned that the advertisement had been handed to a clerk in typewritten form and with a typewritten signature, and paid for in advance, whereas Blair's regular advertising was done on a charge account. This and other information tended to show that the agent was not responsible for the advertisement. In its issue of Monday, July 12, the Daily News printed an explanatory statement.
Other speakers at the meeting were a real estate dealer and an alderman. Considerable indignation was expressed over the false light in which the community had been placed. Even the suggestion that Negroes might by chance become a part of this community seemed to be abhorrent. As far as Negroes were concerned there was no excitement, but they resented being used to frighten white residents.
PROPORTION OF NEGROES TO TOTAL POPULATION
1910
DATA OBTAINED FROM FEDERAL CENSUS
"Contested neighborhoods."—The contested neighborhoods are by far the most important among the types of non-adjusted neighborhoods, both because of the actual presence in them of varying numbers of Negroes and their bearing on the future relations of the races. The efforts in such neighborhoods to keep out Negroes involve stimulation of anti-Negro sentiment and organization of property owners, and the campaign against the presence of Negroes as neighbors develops into a campaign against Negroes. Negroes in turn resent both the propaganda statements and the organized efforts. A continuous struggle, marked by bombings, foreclosures of mortgages, and court disputes, is the result.
The most conspicuous type of a "contested neighborhood" is that known as Kenwood and Hyde Park. In this general neighborhood, from Thirty-ninth to Fifty-ninth streets and from State Street to Lake Michigan, hostility toward Negroes has been plainly and even forcibly expressed through organized efforts to oust them and prevent their further encroachment. The situation is peculiar. This is the part of the old South Side in which most of the Negro population of Chicago has settled. The so-called "Black Belt" has been overcrowded for years. Old and deteriorated housing and its insufficiency have been steadily driving Negroes out of it in search of other homes.
It was inevitable that the great influx of migrants should overflow into surrounding territory. Many migrants brought funds, having sold out their homes and other possessions. Negroes who had lived for some time in the "Black Belt" were eager to escape from it, and here was their opportunity. They did not wish to go too far from their churches and other established institutions, and Hyde Park was immediately adjoining.
Conditions in Hyde Park during 1916 and 1917 favored the overflow. Numbers of new, and in some instances high-grade, apartment houses had been built during the previous ten or fifteen years. Many whites were leaving their individual houses to live in these apartments or to move to the North and South Shore regions. The houses had become less desirable, and many of them were vacant. The district, except for certain definite neighborhoods, had lost much of its former aristocratic air, with the coming of rooming-and boarding-houses. During 1914, 1915, and 1916 many houses and apartments in Hyde Park were vacant or were rented at low prices. Inducements were offered to prospective tenants in the form of extensive decorations and repairs, or some rental allowance.
Negroes bought houses and apartment buildings and rented anything rentable. This expansion of the Negro boundaries was promoted by both white and Negro real estate agents and property owners with little opposition. These men soon learned that Negroes, with their increased wages due to war conditions, were able to make first payments, at least, on houses and to rent better houses or flats than they had previously been obliged to occupy.
Then the entrance of the United States into the war in 1917 and the suspension of building operations occasioned a house shortage which became acute in 1918. The white demand for dwellings began to exceed the supply. Real estate men of the neighborhood began to discuss plans for re-establishing it as an exclusively white neighborhood. A survey by the Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners' Association showed that of the 3,300 property owners in the district, about 1,000 were Negroes. Neighbors had objected little, the entrance of the Negroes having been so gradual that it was almost unnoticeable.
Both Kenwood and Hyde Park, using these terms in the more restricted sense of the original residential localities that bore the names, had enjoyed the activities of local improvement organizations whose function it was to keep the streets sprinkled and clean, to procure better lighting, and otherwise improve civic conditions. The Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners' Association became prominent in 1918 on account of its agitation to "make Hyde Park white." In October, 1918, a form letter was sent out calling a meeting of the Grand Boulevard district of this Association for October 20. The letter said in part: "We are a red blood organization who say openly, we won't be driven out. We make no secret of our methods, they are effective and legal." A dodger announcing the same meeting read:
Every white person Property Owner in Hyde Park come to this meeting. Protect your Property.
Shall we sacrifice our property for a third of its value and run like rats from a burning ship, or shall we put up a united front and keep Hyde Park desirable for ourselves? It's not too late.
The Grand Boulevard district, described as extending from Thirty-ninth to Sixty-third streets, and from Michigan to Cottage Grove avenues was included in the consolidated organization of the Hyde Park and Kenwood districts. This Association, as was asserted by its president, also had the co-operation of three other similar organizations, one in the Washington Park district, the Lake Front Community Property Owners' Association, operating in the district north of Thirty-ninth Street and south of Thirty-third Street, east of Cottage Grove Avenue; and one in the Englewood district, which is southwest of Hyde Park.
Organization of sentiment: It does not appear that the residents of this neighborhood rose spontaneously to oppose the coming in of Negroes. If this had been the case, the first Negroes moving into the district in 1917 would have felt the opposition. The sudden interest in race occupancy was based upon the alleged depreciation of property by Negroes. With this emphasized, it was not difficult to rally opposition to Negroes as a definite menace. The real estate men gave the alarm, alleging a shrinkage in property values. The effort through the Hyde Park and Kenwood Association was intended to stop the influx and thereby the depreciation. Meetings were held, a newspaper was published, and literature was distributed. Racial antagonism was strong in the speeches at these meetings and in the newspapers. The meeting which probably marked the first focusing of attention on the Kenwood and Hyde Park districts was held May 5, 1919, when the sentiment was expressed that Negro invasion of the district was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire. A prominent white real estate man said: "Property owners should be notified to stand together block by block and prevent such invasion."
Distinctly hostile sentiments were expressed before audiences that came expecting to hear how their property might be saved from "almost certain destruction." A speaker at one of the meetings said in part:
We are taught that the principle of virtue and right shall be the rule of our conduct in all of our transactions with our fellow-men, and therefore it is our duty to help the Negro, to uplift him in his environment, mark you, not ours. But it is not our duty, now mark this, it is not our duty as I see it, nor is it according to the laws of nature for us to live with him as neighbors or on a social basis. There is an immutable, unchanging law that governs the distribution, association and conduct of all living creatures. Man is no exception to the universal
