Jacob Riis is best known for writing about eastern European immigrants living in crowded tenements on New York’s Lower East Side. However, his classic work of photojournalism, How the Other Half Lives, also provided a portrait of New York’s African American residents, many of whom migrated from the South after the Civil War and lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the neighborhoods of Yorkville and Harlem. As this passage demonstrates, Riis was a sharp observer of the forces of racial discrimination that placed blacks at a disadvantage compared to white immigrants.
The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading. The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretense, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not brutal. The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants. Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase [order] banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency. It is business, he will tell you. And it is. He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for. . . .
Cleanliness is the characteristic of the [N]egro in his new surroundings, as it was his virtue in the old. In this respect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale. Nevertheless, he has always had to pay higher rents than even these for the poorest and most stinted rooms. The exceptions I have come across, in which the rents, though high, have seemed more nearly on a level with what was asked for the same number and size of rooms in the average tenement, were in the case of tumble-down rookeries in which no one else would live, and were always coupled with the condition that the landlord should “make no repairs.” It can readily be seen that his profits were scarcely curtailed by his “humanity.” The reason advanced for this systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the same house with colored tenants, or even in a house recently occupied by [N]egroes, and that consequently its selling value is injured. The prejudice undoubtedly exists, but it is not lessened by the house agents, who have set up the maxim “once a colored house, always a colored house.”
There is method in the maxim, as shown by an inquiry made last year by the Real Estate Record. It proved agents to be practically unanimous in the endorsement of the [N]egro as a clean, orderly, and “profitable” tenant. Here is the testimony of one of the largest real estate firms in the city: “We would rather have [N]egro tenants in our poorest class of tenements than the lower grades of foreign white people. We find the former cleaner than the latter, and they do not destroy the property so much. We also get higher prices. We have a tenement on Nineteenth Street, where we get $10 for two rooms which we could not get more than $7.50 for from white tenants previously.” . . .
[Riis cites several similar instances of higher rents charged to black tenants.]
I have quoted these cases at length in order to let in light on the quality of this landlord despotism that has purposely confused the public mind, and for its own selfish ends is propping up a waning prejudice. It will be cause for congratulation if indeed its time has come at last. Within a year, I am told by one of the most intelligent and best informed of our colored citizens, there has been evidence, simultaneous with the colored hegira [flight] from the low downtown tenements, of a movement toward less exorbitant rents.
Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1914), 148, 150–52.