Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New YorkOvington, Mary White
History
Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York
Ovington, Mary White
African Americans -- New York (State) -- New York
Watching the colored children for many months in their play and work, I
have looked for possible distinctive traits. The second generation of
New Yorkers greatly resembles the "Young America" of all nationalities
of the city, shrill-voiced, disrespectful, easily diverted, whether at
work or at play, shrewd, alert, and mischievous--the New York street
child. I remember once helping with a club of eight boys where
seven nationalities were represented, and where no one could have
distinguished Irish from German or Jew from Italian, with his eyes
shut. Had a Negro been brought up among them he would quickly have taken
on their ways. Of the colored children who model their lives after their
mischievous young white neighbors, many outdo the whites in depravity
and lawlessness; but among the boys and girls who live by themselves, as
on San Juan Hill, one sees occasional interesting traits.
The records of the Children's Court of New York (Boroughs of Manhattan
and the Bronx) throw a little light on this matter, and are sufficiently
important to quote with some fulness. For the three years studied, 1904,
1905, 1906, I tabulated the cases of the colored children brought before
the court, and also the cases of the children of the Tenth and Eleventh
Wards, chiefly Hungarians and Russian Jews, expecting to find, in two
such dissimilar groups, interesting comparisons. The following table
shows the result of this study. The court in its annual report gives the
figures for the total number of arrests which I have incorporated in my
table:
RECORD OF ARRESTS IN CHILDREN'S COURT OF MANHATTAN AND THE BRONX FOR
1904, 1905, 1906
Key to Column Headers--
A: No. of children.
B: Arrests per cent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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