In 1910, John Rockefeller Jr. commissioned a door-to-door survey of prostitutes in the worst dens of the city. Irish, French, German, and Italian women selling hand jobs and French style lived in close proximity to black working girls. Had they uttered good day, had they been willing to cross the color line, had they imagined Negroes as neighbors, they might have sounded a whore’s Internationale. This was the very thing that
