The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [212]
Gilroy declared that he was not trying to use the chairman-ship of the Bug Club for personal aggrandizement by trying to get votes. He then told the crowd that the next speaker was a man they had been waiting to hear all evening, a man whose talks were always a delight and benefit, a man of solid intellectual integrity and conviction, who would have many interesting and original words to say on the question of race prejudice which they had been discussing and listening to all evening—John Connolly. Jim told them to listen because he was a brilliant fellow, and King of the Soap Boxers. Red sarcastically described it an honor. Studs suggested shouting him down. Jim said Connolly was tough.
Connolly stood in the center of the circle, a tall, handsome, physically impressive man with dark hair. He spoke in a deep, convincing voice remarking that the previous speakers all seemed to have been debating whether a Yiddish junk-man, a Pullman porter, or a flat-footed guardian of a hundred million city ordinances were the lowest example of the human ape. He did not propose to continue such inane blather. On the contrary, he would present certain aspects of urban growth which were relevant to the question of race prejudice in Chicago. These factors also were not mere hearsay, but plausible ideas presented by members of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and developed from the work they had already done on a community research programmed. He explained that the City of Chicago could be divided into three concentric circles. The innermost of these circles was the business or downtown district, the Loop, where the principal stores, offices, and commercial houses were located, and where most of the high-class legal gypping went on. The second circle housed manufacturing and wholesale houses, slums, tenements, can houses and other haunts of vice. The outer circle made up the residential districts and it could boast of the most fog houses because the sky pilots and camouflage artists always found sweet pickings amongst the well-to-do whose gypping was high-class and within the law. When the city expanded, it expanded from the center. In Chicago, thus, expansion spread out from the Loop. The inner circle was pushed outwards causing corresponding changes in the other concentric circles. The Negroes coming into the situation as an economically inferior race, had naturally found their habitation in the second circle. Since they had located in the slums of the black belt, the city had been growing into a bigger and better Chicago. The pressure of growth was forcing them into newer areas. Furthermore, some of the Negro booboisie had gotten into the big gypping process, and like their white brothers, they did not like to live in stench, and sandwiched in between a whore house and the junk shop of Isadore Goldberg. With their economic rise, the Negroes sought more satisfactory housing conditions. Besides, the black boys were happiest when engaged in the horizontals. That meant an increasing birth-rate amongst them, and another factor necessitating improved and more extensive domiciles. All these factors produced a pressure stronger than individual wills, and resulted in a minor racial migration of Negroes into the white residential districts of the south side. Blather couldn’t halt the process. Neither could violence and race riots. It was an inevitable outgrowth of social and economic forces.
A young fellow booed.
“Some waffle pup in the audience is aching to get his puss slapped. Now the next one of you cheap wise guys who heckles is going to get the smile slapped off your