Chapter 13: The Color Line of New York
Introduction
Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives concentrates on the living conditions for immigrants; specifically in chapter 13 Riis diss how African Americans were treated when it came to tennement housing. We often hear about the pain the European immigrants went through living in the hot, dark rooms stacked one on top of the other but African Americans often faced harsher living conditions.
Chapter 13 Summary
Although African Americans were free in the northern states they were still treated as second class citizens to landlords, and fellow immigrants alike. In fact, African American tenants often paid more than European immigrants only to find themselves living in rundown, abandoned tenements. The average African American paid $10 to every white when whites would only pay $7.50. The ironic part of this being that the majority of African American tenants kept their living space cleaner than those of the European immigrants with slightly more money. To quote Riis “The colored man takes in New York without a struggle, the lower level of menial service for which his past traditions and natural love of ease perhaps as yet fit him best.” Essentially Riis is saying that because of the African American’s man history with work, the remedial, heavy lifting jobs fit him best.
Jacob Riis goes on to say “Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness.” Riis believes that the black man takes life as it comes and enjoys it; that he would rather have fine clothes on his back than a bank account, yet he later says “the negro’s great ambition is to rise in the social scale to which his color has made him a stranger and an outsider…” Despite the awful treatment by European immigrants and the tenement owners, the African American enjoys life as it comes, he is proud to be an American. “He is both willing and anxious to learn and his intellectual status is distinctly improving.” However, his addictions may hold him back.
At the end of chapter 13 Riis explains what could be the African Americans downfall; gambling. Small gambling and policy shops, and fortune tellers line the streets on the way home from work and more often than not, wages from a hard day’s work can go right down the drain, however this was also a problem for poor white men too, it was more destructive when it came to the negro’s life considering he paid more than European immigrants. Riis talks little about fights breaking out while gambling and how handy the black man is with razors and how often police are called into white businesses. Though Riis’ racism shows throughout chapter 13 his ending statement is true “…he may be seen to have advanced much farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise, after all, with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest of us, his white-skinned fellow citizens had any right to expect.”
Bibliography
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penquin Books Ltd., 1890.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penquin Books Ltd., 1890.