The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Locke began looking for an apartment in Washington long before he left Boston. It was good that he did, for after Wilson's declaration of war on April 6, 1917, housing was scarce in Washington, as his real estate agent, R. R. Thompson, informed him. Family friend Helen Irvin, now living and teaching in Washington with her husband, put Locke in touch with Thompson. Thompson's son, a student in her class, informed the elder Thompson that Professor Locke of Howard University was looking for an apartment. Thompson informed Locke that a second-floor apartment in a three-story Victorian building at 1326 R Street had been recently vacated. That would be of negligible historical significance except for what Thompson revealed of the racial protocol of Black housing in the District of Columbia. "This is a three family apartment building each containing five rooms, bath, rear porches, hot water heat, janitor service and which have been renting to whites at $32. but [which are now] for rent to colored at $30. for the first two and $29 for the top one."1 Black tenants paid less than Whites, apparently a reversal of the practice in New York. Even more interesting was Thompson's explanation for why the second-floor apartment was still empty, a month after the owner had moved out and the real estate agent had received several applications to rent it. A "white tenant is still in the first [floor] flat and will be there till about the 1st of Aug., and therefore my other tenants cannot go in, to avoid friction, until Aug. 1."2 While the block was integrated, individual buildings had to remain all White or all "Colored," and Thompson was not about to buck protocol in a southern city.

As soon as the first-floor tenant vacated, Thompson would be able to turn the apartment building over to the Lockes if they moved fast. As Thompson informed Locke, "Owing to the war a large number of people are now beginning to come into Washington, the work of the departments having doubled in some instances. This, I understand is expected to make the houses and apartments scarce. Even though most of these are Whites the average abandonment of houses and apartments by them to colored will cease which cause quarters for colored to be equally as scarce."3 Unlike such industrial cites as Chicago and Pittsburgh, whose wartime population increases were due to the avalanche of southern Black migrants, Washington's population expanded because of the in-migration of White professionals to staff the bureaucratic war machine. Thompson's strategy worked: Locke took the apartment, even though he had to rent it from August 15, rather than his preferred date of September 1, to ensure he would have a comfortable place for him and his mother near Howard University.