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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 51, 20 December 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The national capital itself, Washington, D.C., is .one of the “worst examples” of racial discrimination and segregation in this Jim-Crow country, states a sensational report, based on a two-year survey, released Dec. 10 by the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital.
Setting the pattern for what the report calls “shocking” conditions and a “blot on the nation,” are the federal government itself, the business interests and the churches, both Protestant and Catholic.
Although the conditions cited in the report have long been known, its special significance lies in its findings that Jim Crow in Washington – and by implication, everywhere else in the United States – is deliberately fostered and “planned as a matter of good business.”
The report, sponsored by a committee of 90 prominent liberals headed by Dr. George N. Shuster, president of Hunter College, New York, charges “dominant real estate interests, commercial and financial interests” with “planning the segregation of Negroes in housing, jobs, theatres, restaurants, parks and playgrounds.”
Racial difficulties arise in Washington, says the report, not in the “field of spontaneous relations,” but “on a high policy level where the segregation of the Negro is planned as a matter of good business, and investments are made in the denial of his equal right to own property.
“It is not the poor whites who set the pattern, but men of acknowledged culture and refinement, the leaders of the community.”
Racial discrimination and segregation have grown steadily worse in Washington over the past 50 years and have reached their culmination in the past 16 years of the Democratic Administration, the facts of the report demonstrate.
Dissecting the “anatomy of discrimination in the Federal Government,” the survey discloses that racial abuses prevail in all government departments “as a matter of accepted practice.” While “Jim Crow seems to have been first recognized” in the Republican administration of William Howard Taft, it became “general government policy” under the “New Freedom” administration of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, when the government “set about putting the Negro ‘in his place’.”
Today, the State and Justice Departments, the Budget Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Board consistently refuse to hire Negroes except for “menial jobs that whites will not accept.” Other agencies hire large numbers of Negroes, but only for the lowest-paid jobs, where they are segregated into separate units.
Even the churches have been turned into agencies for “white supremacy.” The report states that “one of the most disturbing aspects of segregation” is the “exclusion of Negro Catholics from ‘white’ Catholic Churches.”
Thus,
“a devout Catholic from Panama entered a Catholic Church in Washington. As he knelt at prayer, a priest approached and handed him a slip of paper. On the paper was the address of a Negro Catholic Church. The priest explained that there were special churches for Negro Catholics and that he would be welcome there.
“Inside the largest churches, Protestant as well as Catholic, visitors are made unwelcome on account of color. Segregation is the public policy of such Christian organizations as the Young Men’s Christian Association.”
So complete is the pattern of segregation fostered by political, business and religious leaders in Washington that “it has reached the place ... where a dog cemetery has erected a bar against the burial of dogs belonging to colored people.”
Negro patients and doctors are barred from “white” hospitals. Colored children are barred from “white” public schools. Negroes are barred from jobs in the telephone company, large stores, etc.
Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling against judicial enforcement of racial covenants, the Washington Real Estate Board’s code provides that no property outside of the narrow “Black Belt” area should ever be “sold, rented, advertised or offered to colored people.”
Thus, 260,000 Negro people, more than a quarter of Washington’s population, are jammed into some of the “ugliest slums in America,” where their life expectancy is 12 years lower on the average than for white Washingtonians.
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