Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short of mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.
The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three dollars for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the Better Business Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and the strong possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t display on counters.
Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows of the Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a gangster who isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an electric chair.
This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time bums and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every flop-house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to town with the seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and G Streets, NW and vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to think of it, Skid Rows all over the continent are around the corner from Chinatown.
We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s coffee and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby on H Street, in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon. Mission Row is the best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets are broad, with grass and trees, and most of the set-back buildings are reconverted residences with stoops and a surviving air of charm. We have been assured it is refreshing to wake up in the gutter here with a smoke hangover.
You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The mission stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no longer troubled by dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a bowl of soup and as much red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the two is available, the former can be dispensed with. Some of these mission-moochers are junkies. But dope, like everything else, is suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is forbidding.
The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this Bowery. Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where girls take their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New York on narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a gambling house.
There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see. That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is in SE--8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought nothing could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made it. At the northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a couple of Filipino joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up white whores. Eighth Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of groggeries and lunch-rooms that hit bottom.
The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly. The Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy paddy-wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But the SP’s seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four or five of the bars--not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow of the Capitol’s dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than four are crazy.
We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen, dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their shoddy trade, long-looped handbags.
The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two girls--call them that in charity--offered themselves to us at $3. The going price in the other places was $5. They circulated along the bar and from booth to booth and from table to table. They do not work in these saloons as B girls or house prostitutes. They use them as points of contact with their trade, apparently with connivance of the management for the business they bring in. In these Sailors’ Row joints we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy bobby-soxers, servant girls and Victory girls. These may ask for money but can be talked out of it. There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses close by. But the dark streets or alleys are free and busy.
6. GREEN PASTURES
Agonized oratory through the decades has been banging against the walls of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given the precious privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.
And we will tell you why there will be no vote--Confidential.
If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr. Jones is a Negro.
We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish--there are more Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible figures.
There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south, north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.
Census figures are off the beam. They always lag in summing up minority races. Most of the migrant census-takers assume that they should help to make the picture as light as possible. If a Negro is not unmistakably black, he is encouraged, if he does not think of it himself, to be listed as a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a West Indian, a South American, Filipino, Indian, Mexican or even Eskimo; the blood of all these is sprinkled through many generations of admixture.
There is no way of calculating how many light-skinned citizens can and do “pass.” Some Negroes sleep in shifts in crowded premises, so that a count in the regular course would register about one-third of the true total. Many are house servants and these do not go into the tally where they are employed, nor are they home during the hours when enumerators call.
More Negroes than whites are police characters, as will be demonstrated. And as a rule members of the race are wary and suspicious of questioners from “the law.” Many census-takers deliberately duck more than superficial duties in predominantly dark districts, because they are confused and afraid after getting hostile receptions and responses.
But in Washington there is one indisputable check.
The District of Columbia has a single Jim Crow law, segregating Negroes and whites--in schools. When pupils are enrolled they must reveal their true race. There can be no tampering with these statistics.
And in the winter of 1950–51 there were registered the following in all public schools through all grades from elementary to teachers’ college:
Negroes, 47,807; whites, 46,080.
Broken down, these figures are even more definitive. There are more Negroes than is evidenced by the bare totals. Negroes, because of their economic outlook, do not keep their children in school as long as do whites. That is sharply proven by the enrollment in the senior high schools:
Negroes, 4,787; whites, 7,176.
But there are 10,146 colored children in junior high schools compared to 9,270 whites.
The attendance at parochial and private schools is minor. Washington has the largest per capita Negro Catholic population in the United States.
Even an excess of 10 per cent of whites in the grand total and allowing for unmarried government workers would still indicate a Negro majority over all, because of the earlier departure from school of Negro children, as shown above.
This reveals a startling metamorphosis in a ten-year period. In 1940 the school record showed 66,000 whites and 36,000 Negroes. Thus there has since been a decline of 20,000 white children and a rise of 12,000 Negro children. The over-all decline is due to removal of white families to suburbs.
Negroes lived in Washington before the first President chose the rolling land along the Potomac to bear his name. Slavery was legal in the capital until the emancipation. The population of Washington about doubled between 1860 and 1870. Much of this influx represented slaves who escaped from plantations and got through the Union lines during the Civil War. But the big swell came when thousands of ex-slaves, free and foot-loose for the first time in their lives, left the destroyed and deserted Dixie farms and headed for Washington, which was not only near Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, but which exercised a fascination for them because they felt safer near their savior and their demigod, Abraham Lincoln.
Until the middle 70’s, Washingtonians of all colors had home rule, elected their own officials under a territorial form of government similar to that now practiced in Alaska and Hawaii, where mayors, legislators, judges and other lower-level officials are elected. They sent a delegate to Congress.