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In the course of an investigation recentlymade by the Juvenile Protective Associationof Chicago upon the conditions ofboys in the County Jail, the Association was much startledby the disproportionate number of colored boys andyoung men; for although the colored people of Chicagoapproximate 1/40 of the entire population, 1/8 of the boysand young men and nearly 1/3 of the girls andyoung women who had been confined in the jail duringthe year were negroes.

 

The Association had previously been impressedwith the fact that most of themaids employed in houses of prostitutionwere colored girls and that many employmentagencies quite openly sent them there, althoughthey would not take the risk of sending a white girl toa 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 wouldaccount for a great amount of delinquency among thecolored boys and the public opinion which would so carelesslyplace the virtue of a colored girl in jeopardy, theJuvenile Protective Association found itself involved in astudy of the industrial and social status of the coloredpeople of Chicago.

 

While the morality of every young personis closely bound up with that of hisfamily and his immediate environment,this is especially true of the sons and daughters of coloredfamilies who, because they continually find the door ofopportunity shut in their faces, are more easily forcedback into their early environment however vicious it mayhave been. The enterprising young people in immigrantfamilies who have passed through the public schools andare earning good wages, continually succeed in movingtheir entire households into more prosperous neighborhoodswhere they gradually lose all trace of their tenement-houseexperiences. On the contrary, the coloredyoung people, however ambitious, find it extremely difficultto move their families or even themselves into desirableparts of the city and to make friends in thesesurroundings.

 

Because the fate of the young peoplewas thus so inextricably a part of thelife of the colored people in Chicago,the investigators found themselves studying the entirehistory of the negro on the shores of Lake Michigan,following it to the very beginning where it is said thefirst cabin was built in 1779, by a negro from SanDomingo.

Slavery, of course, prevailed in Illinois just aseverywhere else in the Northwest Territory, havingbeen introduced during the French occupation and allowedto continue under the English. When, by anact of Congress, in 1787, slavery was forever prohibited“northwest of the Ohio River,” this act was sostrenuously objected to

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