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¶Detroit banks, in white neighborhoods, employ Negro tellers.
¶ Many Northern department stores hire Negro sales help.
¶ New York breweries now hire Negro production workers.
The Negro's biggest trouble comes when he tries to live in a white neighborhood. The worst race riots in recent U.S. history took place in Detroit (1943) and Chicago (1951), where there had been a huge, wartime influx of Negro workers. Today, both cities live in somewhat uneasy peace. The case of Chicago is fairly typical. "Property owners' leagues," openly dedicated to keeping Negroes out of white neighborhoods, have disappeared or gone underground. Nevertheless, Negroes rarely escape their ghetto—they simply stretch its boundaries. White people retreat before the Negro advance—generally to the suburbs, where Negroes are usually strictly barred. In many Chicago neighborhoods, Negroes and whites live side by side. A mayor's commission has organized the "lighthouse system," under which citizens alert police as soon as trouble signs appear in a neighborhood. Police themselves have been put through a special "human relations" training program.
The South: Minefield among Magnolias
Even if he does not meet outright hostility in the North, the Negro is apt to meet indifference, which can hurt worse. Not many Northerners are interested enough in Negroes to worry about where they ride on a streetcar; but few are interested enough to be really kind to them, either. The South—still the home of two-thirds of the U.S.'s Negroes—cares far more deeply about its Negro problem.
A South African visitor reports: "I went down there to find the Deep South. But everywhere I went, they said: 'Oh, this isn't the Deep South. You've got to go farther on to find what you're looking for, Mister.' I never did find the Deep South, where they lynch Negroes and provide source material for William Faulkner and Lillian Smith. It wasn't in Tennessee, it wasn't in Georgia, it wasn't in Mississippi. Now I'm beginning to wonder whether the Deep South really exists any more."
There is a lot of evidence that it does not. The color line is no longer a barbed-wire fence strung between the magnolia trees. It is more like a minefield through which whites and Negroes must carefully pick their way—and the map is obviously out of date. Segregation now seems like something out of Alice in Wonderland as rewritten by Herman Talmadge.
In the South, a Negro may ride a Pullman car and eat anywhere in a diner (until a few years ago, he had to eat behind a curtain). But he must buy his tickets at a segregated ticket window. He may sit anywhere in an airplane, but his waiting room at the airport is likely to be Jim Crow. He may ride in elevators, body-to-body with whites, but in buses and streetcars he must still jostle past standing white passengers to the Jim Crow rear. (In some cities, he may sit down in the white area if there are empty seats, and white people will often sit down in the colored area if the white area is crowded.)
Several states give Negro doctors full membership in their medical societies, but Negro doctors are not allowed to practice in most Southern hospitals. (White