Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as follows:
When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.
After the block-buster--in her own name--made the purchase, she and her large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started another Negro island in the city.
When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base and repeated the process.
You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.
In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare. In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive, aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially policemen.
Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:
Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States. Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury, former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven $6,000 limousine.
William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations. He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by President Truman.
Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word “nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not found among whites--resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent comer from the Southern plantations.
7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE
There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel prize or is selected the rookie of the year.
We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.
That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on the Caucasian population.
The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them. That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.
Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress racial references.
Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests for Part One felonies--the more serious--in 1949 were as follows:
Colored males, 7,715. Colored females, 1,085. Total colored, 8,800. White male, 2,396. White female, 309. Total white, 2,705.
Here is a breakdown on some:
Murder, colored 40; white 8. Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1. Rape, colored 140; white 23. Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381. Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.
Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of the lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic policy of visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.
Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important misdemeanors showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.
Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.
The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes in Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give the full picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks, especially if there is no white complainant. They have nothing to gain by such a pinch; they merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the gentle Negro.”
Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment on the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the inevitable discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or left-wing judge.
If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:
Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse for midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW, with two occupants.
Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott, colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection with stolen auto hold-ups.
Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on the front seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a woman, who proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW, who had been picked up by Scott.
Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver of the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator down to the floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton, his head and shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel, attempted to steer. It was impossible for either officer to jump or let go. The stolen car finally collided with a barricade, ran over the sidewalk.
With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still struggling, the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed collided with a tractor trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely demolished.