THE COLORED PEOPLE OF CHICAGO AN INVESTIGATION MADE FOR The Juvenile Protective Association BY A. P. DRUCKER SOPHIA BOAZ A. L. HARRIS MIRIAM SCHAFFNER TEXT BY LOUISE DE KOVEN BOWEN 1913 The Colored People of Chicago [Sidenote: =Colored People in County Jail=] In the course of an investigation recently made by the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago upon the conditions of boys in the County Jail, the Association was much startled by the disproportionate number of colored boys and young men; for although the colored people of Chicago approximate 1/40 of the entire population, 1/8 of the boys and young men and nearly 1/3 of the girls and young women who had been confined in the jail during the year were negroes. [Sidenote: =Maids in Houses of Prostitution=] The Association had previously been impressed with the fact that most of the maids employed in houses of prostitution were colored girls and that many employment agencies quite openly sent them there, although they would not take the risk of sending a white girl to a place where, if she was forced into a life of prostitution, the agency would be liable to a charge of pandering. In an attempt to ascertain the causes which would account for a great amount of delinquency among the colored boys and the public opinion which would so carelessly place the virtue of a colored girl in jeopardy, the Juvenile Protective Association found itself involved in a study of the industrial and social status of the colored people of Chicago. [Sidenote: =Morality and Environment=] While the morality of every young person is closely bound up with that of his family and his immediate environment, this is especially true of the sons and daughters of colored families who, because they continually find the door of opportunity shut in their faces, are more easily forced back into their early environment however vicious it may have been. The enterprising young people in immigrant families who have passed through the public schools and are earning good wages, continually succeed in moving their entire households into more prosperous neighborhoods where they gradually lose all trace of their tenement-house experiences. On the contrary, the colored young people, however ambitious, find it extremely difficult to move their families or even themselves into desirable parts of the city and to make friends in these surroundings. [Sidenote: =The First Negro in Chicago=] Because the fate of the young people was thus so inextricably a part of the life of the colored people in Chicago, the investigators found themselves studying the entire history of the negro on the shores of Lake Michigan, following it to the very beginning where it is said the first cabin was built in 1779, by a negro from San Domingo.