Not only does the negro suffer from this extreme dilapidation, but he pays a heavy cost in the form of high rent. A careful house to house canvass showed that in the most rundown colored neighborhoods in the city, the rent for an ordinary four-room apartment was much higher than in any other section of the city. In crowded immigrant neighborhoods in different parts of the city, the median rental for the prevailing four-room apartment was between $8 and $8.50; in South Chicago near the steel mills it was between $9 and $9.50; and in the Jewish quarter, between $10 and $10.50 was charged. But in the great black belt of the South Side the sum exacted was between $12 and $12.50. That is, while half of the people in the Bohemian, Polish, and Lithuanian districts were paying less than $8.50, for their four-room apartments; the steel-mill employees less than $9.50, and the Jews in the Ghetto less than $10.50, the negro, in the midst of extreme dilapidation and crowded into the territory adjoining the segregated vice district, pays from $12 to $12.50. This is from $2 to $4 a month more than the immigrant is paying for an apartment of the same size in a better state of repair. It seemed worth while to collect and to present the facts relating to housing conditions in the negro districts of Chicago because one must hope that they would not be tolerated if the great mass of white people knew of their existence. Most people stand for fair play. The persecutions which the negro endures because of race prejudice undoubtedly express the feeling of but a small minority of his fellow-citizens of the white race. Their continuance must be due to the fact that the great majority are completely ignorant of the heavy burden of injustice that the negro carries. Ignorance is the bulwark of prejudice, and race prejudice is singularly dependent upon an ignorance which is, to be sure, sometimes willful but which more often is unintentional and accidental. It has come about, however, that the small minority who cherish their prejudices have had the power to make life increasingly hard for the black man. Today they not only refuse to sit in the same part of the theater with him and to let him enter a hotel which they patronize, but they also refuse to allow him to live on the same street with them or in the same neighborhood. Even in the North where the city administration does not recognize a black “ghetto” or “pale,” the real estate agents who register and commercialize what they suppose to be a universal race prejudice are able to enforce one in practice. It is out of this minority persecution that the special negro housing problem has developed.