of the bombing campaign is given in another section of this report.
At another meeting it was asserted that the Kenwood and Hyde Park Association had a membership of 1,000 persons, and it was estimated that in the district to which it applied the investment in real estate was $1,000,000,000. The purpose of the organization was declared to be "to guard that $1,000,000,000 against depreciation from anything." One speaker said he did not believe there was a piece of property west of Cottage Grove Avenue in Hyde Park that was worth 33 cents on the dollar "as it stands now with this invasion." He said his home cost about $25,000, but he felt safe in saying that he could not then get $8,000 for it. A city alderman was one of the speakers at this meeting.
Most of the real estate dealers in the area were claimed as members of the Kenwood and Hyde Park Association or its Grand Boulevard branch. Special reference was made at various times and in scathing terms to dealers who declined to affiliate. At the meeting of the Grand Boulevard district on January 19, 1920, it was reported that the Executive Committee of the parent association had succeeded during the previous two or three months in educating real estate men. "The colored man," a speaker said, "would have never been in this district had not our real estate men in their ambition to acquire wealth and commissions, which is perfectly legitimate, put them here, although this action on their part has been very shortsighted, as some of them now admit." This speaker said also that the Association's "greatest successes" had been in getting all but five or six of the real estate men to sign a pledge not to show or rent or sell any property "within our locality that we claim jurisdiction of in the future to colored people."
PROPORTION OF NEGROES TO TOTAL POPULATION
1920
DATA OBTAINED FROM FEDERAL CENSUS
The Property Owners' Journal exerted no little influence in the creation of this sentiment. Claiming a wide circulation, its utterances were so extreme in bitterness against Negroes that many of the residents of the district, although opposed to the coming in of Negroes, held aloof from the organization because they could not indorse appeals to race hatred and advocacy of measures which they felt were illegal and dangerously near to violence. These extracts are from its issue of December 13, 1919:
To damage a man's property and destroy its value is to rob him. The person who commits that act is a robber. Every owner has the right to defend his property to the utmost of his ability with every means at his disposal.
Any property owner who sells property anywhere in our district to undesirables is an enemy to the white owner and should be discovered and punished.
Protect your property!
Property conservatively valued at $50,000,000 owned by some 10,000 individuals is menaced by a possible Negro invasion of Hyde Park. The thing is simply impossible and must not occur.
These are from its issue of January 1, 1920:
As stated before, every colored man who moves into Hyde Park knows that he is damaging his white neighbors' property. Therefore, he is making war on the white man. Consequently, he is not entitled to any consideration and forfeits his right to be employed by the white man. If employers should adopt a rule of refusing to employ Negroes who persist in residing in Hyde Park to the damage of the white man's property, it would soon show good results.
The Negro is using the Constitution and its legal rights to abuse the moral rights of the white.
This is from its issue of February 15, 1920:
There is nothing in the make-up of a Negro, physically or mentally, which should induce anyone to welcome him as a neighbor. The best of them are insanitary, insurance companies class them as poor risks, ruin alone follows in their path. They are as proud as peacocks, but have nothing of the peacock's beauty. Certain classes of the Negroes, such as the Pullman porters, political heelers and hairdressers are clamoring for equality. They are not content with remaining with the creditable members of their race, they seem to want to mingle with the whites. Their inordinate vanity, their desire to shine as social lights caused them to stray out of their paths and lose themselves. We who would direct them back where they belong, towards their people, are censured and called "unjust." Far more unjust are their actions to the members of their race who have no desire to interfere with the homes of the white citizens of this district. The great majority of the Negroes are not stirred by any false ambition that results only in discord. Wherever friction arises between the races, the suffering is usually endured by the innocent. If these misleaders are sincere in their protestations of injustice, if they are not hypocritical in their pretence of solving the race question, let them move. Their actions savour of spite against the whites, whose good will can never be attained by such tactics. The place for a Negro aristocrat is in a Negro neighborhood.
In the same issue, under the heading Caveat Vendor (Let the Seller Beware) appeared the following:
People who sell their property to Negroes and take first and second mortgages and promises to pay monthly sums do not know what risks they are taking in trying to collect the money. Mrs. Nora Foster of 4207 Prairie sold her house to some niggers and when she went to collect she was assaulted and thrown down a flight of stairs. This is not a case of saying it served her right because more than seven of her neighbors sold before Mrs. Foster did, but it does serve as a splendid example of the fact that niggers are undesirable neighbors and entirely irresponsible and vicious.
The Negroes' innate desire to "flash," to live in the present, not reckoning the future, their inordinate love for display has resulted in their being misled by the example of such individuals as Jesse Binga and Oscar De Priest. In their loud mouthing about equality with the whites they have wormed their course into white neighborhoods, where they are not wanted and where they have not the means to support property.
Keep the Negro in his place, amongst his people and he is healthy and loyal. Remove him, or allow his newly discovered importance to remove him from his proper environment and the Negro becomes a nuisance. He develops into an overbearing, inflated, irascible individual, overburdening his brain to such an extent about social equality, that he becomes dangerous to all with whom he comes in contact, he constitutes a nuisance, of which the neighborhood is anxious to rid itself.
Another building which has been polluted by Negro tenancy is to be renovated on May 1st. … Either the Negro must vanish or decay sets in. Who is next?
Misleaders of the Negro, those flamboyant, noisy, witless individuals, who, by power of superior gall and gumption, have blustered their way into positions of prominence amongst their people, wonder why this district resents their intrusion. To allow themselves an opportunity to parade their dusky persons before an audience of their followers, these misleaders held a meeting of the Protective Circle (composed, no doubt, of Negro roundheads), at which a varied assortment of Negro preachers, politicians and other what nots exposed our methods and organization work. With much comical oratory, they dangled our association before the spellbound eyes of their sable dupes and after extreme fuming and sweating appointed about fifteen committees to annihilate all Hyde Parkers.
III. BOMBINGS
A form of organized resistance to the coming of Negroes into new neighborhoods was the bombings of their homes and the homes of real estate men, white and Negro, who were known or supposed to have sold, leased, or rented local property to them.
From July 1, 1917, to March 1, 1921, the Negro housing problem was marked by fifty-eight bomb explosions. Two persons, both Negroes, were killed, a number of white and colored persons were injured, and the damage
