The Chicago Race Riots

Front matter

THE

CHICAGO RACE RIOTS

JULY, 1919

Introductory Note

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

To record the background of an event, infinitely more disgraceful than that Mexican banditry or Red Terror about which we are all so virtuously indignant, is sufficient reason for republishing these articles by Carl Sandburg. They are first hand, and they are sympathetic, and they will move those who will allow themselves to be moved.

Moved not alone to indignation, though that is needed, but to thought. It is not possible, I think, to examine this record without concluding that the race problem as we know it is really a by-product of our planless, disordered, bedraggled, drifting democracy. Until we have learned to house everybody, employ everybody at decent wages In a self-respecting status, guarantee his civil liberties, and bring education and play to him, the bulk of our talk about "the race problem" will remain a sinister mythology. In a dirty civilization the relation between black men and white will be a dirty one. In a clean civilization the two races can conduct their business together cleanly, and not until then.

Certainly the idea must go that in order to segregate the races biologically it is necessary to degrade and terrorize one of them. For those who degrade and terrorize are inevitably themselves degraded and terror-stricken. It is only the parvenue, the snob, the coward who is forever proclaiming his superiority. And by proclaiming It he evokes imitation in his victim. Hence the peculiar oppressiveness of recently oppressed peoples in Europe. Hence the Negro who desires to be an imitation white man. Hence again the determination to suppress the Negro who attempts to imitate the white man. For so long as the status of the white man is in every way superior to that of the colored, the advancement of the colored man can mean nothing but an attempt to share the white man's social privileges. From this arises that terrible confusion between the idea of social equality and the idea of social mixture.

Since permanent degradation is unthinkable, and amalgamation undesirable both for blacks and whites, the ideal would seem to lie in what might be called race parallelism. Parallel lines may be equally long and equally straight; they do not join except in infinity, which is further away than anyone need worry about just now. We shall have to work out with the Negro a relationship which gives him complete access to all the machinery of our common civilization, and yet allows him to live so that no Negro need dream of a white heaven and of bleached angels. Pride of race will come to the Negro when a dark skin is no longer associated with poverty, ignorance, misery, terror and insult. When this pride arises every white man in America will be the happier for it. He will be able then, as he is not now, to enjoy the finest quality of civilized living—the fellowship of different men.

Walter Lippman.

Whitestone, Long Island.

August 26, 1919.

Chapter 1

I

THE CHICAGO RACE RIOTS

The so-called race riots in Chicago during the last week of July, 1919, started on a Sunday at a bathing beach. A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked for the arrest of the boys throwing stones. The policeman refused. As the dead body of the drowned boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown, on both sides. The policeman held on to his refusal to make arrests. Fighting then began that spread to all the borders of the Black Belt. The score at the end of three days was recorded as twenty negroes dead, fourteen white men dead, and a number of negro houses burned.

The riots furnished an excuse for every element of Gangland to go to it and test their prowess by the most ancient ordeals of the jungle. There was one section of the city that supplied more white hoodlums than any other section. It was the district around the stockyards and packing houses.

I asked Maclay Hoyne, states attorney of Cook County, "Does it seem to you that you get more tough birds from out around the stockyards than anywhere else in Chicago?" And he answered that more bank robbers, payroll bandits, automobile bandits, highwaymen and strong-arm crooks come from this particular district than any other that has come to his notice during seven years of service as chief prosecuting official.

And I recalled that a few years ago a group of people from the University of Chicago came over into the stockyards district and made a survey. They went into one neighborhood and asked at every house about how the people lived—and died. They found that seven times as many white hearses haul babies along the streets here as over in the lake shore district a mile east. Their statement of scientific fact was that the infant mortality was seven times higher here proportionately, than a mile to the east in a district where housing and wages are different.

So on the one hand we have blind lawless government failing to function through policemen ignorant of Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a theory sanctioned and baptized in a storm of red blood. And on the other hand we have a gaunt involuntary poverty from which issues the hoodlum.

At least three conditions marked the events of violence in Chicago in July, 1919, and gave the situation a character essentially different from the backgrounds of other riots. Here are factors that give the Chicago flare-up historic import:

1. The Black Belt population of 50,000 in Chicago was more than doubled during the war. No new houses or tenements were built. Under pressure of war industry the district, already notoriously overcrowded and swarming with slums, was compelled to have and hold in its human dwelling apparatus more than twice as many people as it held before the war.

2. The Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America. It connects directly with a city administration decisive in its refusal to draw the color line, and a mayor whose opponents failed to defeat him with the covert circulation of the epithet of "nigger lover." To such a community the black doughboys came back from France and the cantonment camps. Also it is known that hundreds—it may be thousands—have located in Chicago in the hope of permanent jobs and homes in preference to returning south of Mason and Dixon's line, where neither a world war for democracy, nor the Croix de Guerre, nor three gold chevrons, nor any number of wound stripes, assures them of the right to vote or to have their votes counted or to participate responsibly in the elective determinations of the American republic.

3. Thousands of white men and thousands of colored men stood together during the riots, and through the public statements of white and colored officials of the Stockyards Labor Council asked the public to witness that they were shaking hands as "brothers" and could not be counted on for any share in the mob shouts and ravages. This was the first time in any similar crisis in an American community that a large body of mixed nationalities and races—Poles, Negroes, Lithuanians, Italians, Irishmen, Germans, Slovaks, Russians, Mexicans, Yankees, Englishmen, Scotchmen—proclaimed that they were organized and opposed to violence between white union men and colored union men.

In any American city where the racial situation is critical at this moment, the radical and active factors probably are (1) housing (2) politics and war psychology and (3) organization of labor.

The articles that follow are reprints from the pages of the Chicago Daily News, which assigned the writer to investigate the situation three weeks before the riots began. Publication of the articles had proceeded two weeks and were approaching the point where a program of constructive recommendations would have been proper when the riots broke and as usual nearly everybody was more interested in the war than how it got loose.

The arrangement of the material herewith is all rather hit or miss, with the stress often in the wrong place, as in much newspaper writing. However, because of the swift movement of events at this hour and because items of information and views of trends here have been asked for in telegrams, letters and phone calls from a number of thoughtful people, they are made conveniently available for such service as they are worth.

Chapter 2

II

THE BACKGROUND

Chicago's "black belt," so called, to-day holds at least 125,000 persons. This is double the number that same district held five years ago, when the world war began.

Chicago is probably the third city in the United States in number of colored persons and, at the lowest, ranks as fifth in this regard, according to estimates of Frederick Rex, municipal reference librarian. The four cities that may possibly exceed Chicago in this population group are New York, which had 91,709 at the last census; Baltimore, with 84,749; Philadelphia, with 84,459, and Washington, with 94,466. The colored population in all these cities has increased since the last census.

New Orleans, which had 89,262, has decreased instead of gaining, and the same will apply to three other large southern cities where the colored population at the begining of the war was slightly above 50,000 and just about equal to that of Chicago. These are Birmingham, Ala., Atlanta, Ga., and Memphis, Tenn., all reported to have decreased, while Chicago has gained.

During interviews with some forty persons more or less expert on the question the lowest estimate of the present colored population of Chicago was 100,000 and the highest 200,000. The figure most commonly agreed on was 125,000. There is no doubt that upward of 150,000 have arrived here. The number that have departed for other points is unknown.

Under the pressure of the biggest over-crowding problem any race or nation has faced in a Chicago neighborhood, the population of the district is spilling over, or rather is being irresistibly squeezed out into other residence districts.

Such is the immediately large and notable fact touching what is generally called "the race problem."

Other facts pertaining to the situation, each one indicating a trend of importance, are the following:

Local draft board No. 4 in a district surrounding State and 35th streets, containing 30,000 persons, of whom 90 per cent are colored, registered upward of 9,000 and sent 1,850 colored men to cantonments. Of these 1,850 there were only 125 rejections. On Nov. 11, when the armistice was declared, this district had 7,832 men passed by examiners and ready for the call to the colors. So it is clear that in one neighborhood are thousands of strong young men who have been talking to each other on topics more or less intimately related to the questions, "What are we ready to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning of freedom; of self-determination?"

In barber shop windows and in cigar stores and haberdasheries are helmets, rifles, cartridges, canteens and haversacks and photographs of negro regiments that were sent to France.

Walk around this district and talk with the black folk and leaders of the black folk. Ask them, "What about the future of the colored people?" The reply that comes most often and the thought that seems uppermost is: "We made the supreme sacrifice; they didn't need any work or fight law for us; our record, like Old Glory, the flag we love because it stands for our freedom, hasn't got a spot on it; we 'come clean'; now we want to see our country live up to the constitution and the declaration of independence."

Soldiers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, politicians, machinists, teamsters, day laborers—this is the inevitable outstanding thought they offer when consulted about tomorrow, next week, next year or the next century for the colored race in America, There is no approaching the matters of housing, jobs or political relations of the colored people to-day without taking consideration of their own vivid conception of what they consider their unquestioned Americanism.

They had one bank three years ago. Now they have five. Three co-operative societies to run stores are forming. Five new weekly papers, two new monthly magazines, seven drug stores, one hospital—all of these have come since Junius B. Wood's encyclopedic recital of negro activities in Chicago appeared in The Daily News in December, 1916. Also since then a life insurance company and a building and loan association have been organized. In one district where there were counted sixty-nine neighborhood agencies of demoralization there have been established within two years under negro auspices, a cafe, a drug store, a laundry, a bakery, a shoe repair shop, a tailor shop, a fish market, a dry goods store—all told, twenty-four constructive agencies entered the contest against sixty-nine of the destructive kind.

The colored people of Chicago seem to have more big organizations with fewer press agents and less publicity than any other group in the city. They have, for instance, the largest single protestant church membership in North America in the Olivet Baptist church at South Park avenue and East 31st street. It has more than 8,500 members. The "miscellaneous" local of the Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen's union, at 43d and State streets, reports that upward of 10,000 colored workmen are affiliated. The People's Movement club has moved into a $50,000 clubhouse, has 2,000 active and 6,000 associate members.

There is apparent an active home buying, home owning movement, with many circumstances indicating that the colored people coming in with the new influx are making preparations to stay, their viewpoint being that of the boll weevil in that famous negro song, "This'll Be My Home." In nearly all circles the opinion is voiced that Chicago is the most liberal all around town in the country, and the constitution of Illinois the most liberal of all state constitutions. And so if they can't make Chicago a good place for their people to live in the colored people wonder where they can go.

Their houses, jobs, politics, their hope and outlook in the "black belt," are topics to be considered in this series of articles.

Chapter 3

III

THE NEGRO MIGRATION

At Michigan avenue and East 31st street comes along the street a colored woman and three of her children. Two months ago they lived in Alabama, in a two room hut with a dirt floor and no running water and none of the things known as "conveniences." Barefooted and bareheaded, the children walk along with the mother, casually glancing at Michigan avenue's moving line of motor cars. Suddenly, as in a movie play, a big limousine swings to the curb. A colored man steps out, touches his hat to the mother and children and gives them the surprise of their lives. This is what he says:

"We don't do this up here. It isn't good for us colored folks to send our children out on the streets like this. We're all working together to do the best we can. One thing we're particular about is the way we take the little ones out on the streets.

"They ought to look as if they're washed clean all over. And they ought to have shoes and stockings and hats and clean shirts on. Now you go home and see to that. If you haven't got the money to do it, come and see me. Here's my card."

He gives her the card of a banker and real estate man at an office where they collect rent monthly from over 1,000 tenants, and where they hold titles in fee simple to the rented properties.

This little incident gives some idea of the task of assim Chicago took in the last five years in handling the more than 70,000 colored people who came here in that time, mostly from southern states.

A big brown stone residence in Wabash avenue, of the type that used to be known as "mansions," housed five families from Alabama. They threw their dinner leavings from the back porch. And one night they sat on the front steps and ate watermelon and threw the rinds out past the curbstone. In effect, they thought they were going to live in the packed human metropolis of Chicago just as they had lived "down in Alabam'."

Now they have learned what garbage cans are for. From all sides the organized and intelligent forces of the colored people have hammered home the suggestion that every mistake of one colored man or woman may result in casting a reflection on the whole group. The theory is, "Be clean for your own sake, but remember that every good thing you do goes to the credit of all of us."

It must not be assumed, of course, that the types thus far mentioned are representative of all who come from Alabama or other states of the south. Among the recent arrivals, for example, are a banker, the managing editor of a weekly newspaper, a manual training instructor in the public schools and several men who have made successes in business. It is possible now for Chicago white people to come into contact with colored men who have had years of experience in direct co-operation with Tuskegee and Hampton institutes and with the workings in southern states of the theories of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and others. The application of these theories is being continued in Chicago.

Willis N. Huggins, an intensely earnest and active worker for the interests of the colored people, is an instructor in manual training at the Wendell Phillips high school. He came from Alabama in 1917.

"I was making a social survey of the northern counties of Alabama through the financial aid of Mrs. Emmons Blaine of Chicago," he said to me. "My work was discontinued because our information collected in that territory would be useless. About one-fourth of the colored people migrated to the north.

"There were 12,000 colored people in Decatur, Ala., before the war. The migration took away 4,000, judging by a house to house canvas I made in various sections of that one city. When they took the notion they just went. You could see hundreds of houses where mattresses, beds, wash bowls and pans were thrown around the back yard after the people got throu^ picking out w'hat they wanted to take along.

"All the railroad trains from big territory farther south came on through Decatur. Some days five and six of these trains came along. The colored people in Decatur would go to the railroad station and talk with these other people about where they were going. And when the moving fever hit them there was no changing their minds.

"Take Huntsville, only a few miles from Decatur, on a branch line. There they didn't see these twelve coach trains coming through loaded with emigrants. So from Huntsville there was not much emigration.

"In many localities the educated negroes came right along with their people. I rode in September, 1917, with a minister from Monroe, La. This was his second trip. He had been to Boston and organized a church with 100 members of his Louisiana congregation. Now he was taking fifty, all in one coach. I hear that later he made a third trip and has now moved the whole of his original congregation of 300 members up to Boston. He told me that the first group he took to Boston were all naturally inclined to go. The second group made up their minds more slowly. He said that probably they would not have gone at all if it had not been for fears of lynching. A series of lynchings in Texas at that time gave him examples from which to argue that the north was safer for colored people.

"With many who have come north, the attraction of wages and employment is secondary to the feeling that they are going where there are no lynchings. Others say that while they know they would never be lynched in the south and they are not afraid on that score, they do want to go where they are sure there is more equality and opportunity than in the south. The schools in the north are an attraction to others.

"I make these observations from having personally talked with my people in Madison county, Alabama, where there were 10,000 negroes, of whom 5,000 came north in two years."

Chapter 4

IV

REAL ESTATE

Eight bombs or dynamite containers have been exploded within the last five months on the doorsteps of buildings in the south division of the city, all of these buildings being situated in streets adjacent to the residence district popularly called the "black belt," where the population is about 80 per cent colored. The eight explosions took place between Feb. 5 and June 13.

The amount of property destroyed by each explosion varied from $50 to $600. Seven of the cases were investigated by the police of the station situated at Wabash avenue and 48th street, and one was investigated by the police of the Cottage Grove Avenue station.

The police began their work with two theories in mind: one that the explosions were the result of race feeling, the other that there was a clash between two real estate interests. As a result of their work, the police now believe that the second theory is the more likely to be correct.

Facts in this situation to be reckoned with are that practically every organization of colored people, business, political, social and religious, is making propaganda in favor of the right of the colored people to buy real estate "wherever the white man's money is good." On the other hand, the only organized and noticeable propaganda among white organizations in this respect is the movement in real estate organizations and neighborhood improvement clubs.

With reference to the effect of colored residents on real estate values, there are two points of view. it is asserted, on one hand, that in all cases where the property owner has kept up the improvements and refused to sell to speculators, his real estate has risen in value. On the other hand, it is contended that colored residents bring down property values in a neighborhood. Both sides point to specific instances in support of their contentions.

L. M. Smith, of the Kenwood Improvement association, a prominent spokesman for real estate interests, and one of those most active in opposition to the movement of colored people eastward in his part of the city, gave the writer the following expression of his views:

"We want to be fair. We want to do what is right. But these people will have to be more or less pacified. At a conference where their representatives were present, I told them we might as well be frank about it, 'you people are not admitted to our society,' I said. Personally, I have no prejudice against them. I have had experience of many years dealing with them, and I'll say this for them: I have never had to foreclose a mortgage on one of them. They have been clean in every way, and always prompt in their payments. But, you know. improvements are coming along the lake shore, the Illinois Central, and all that; we can't have these people coming over here.

"Not one cent has been appropriated by our organization for bombing or anything like that.

"They injure our investments. They hurt our values. I couldn't say how many have moved in, but there's at least a hundred blocks that are tainted. We are not making any threats, but we do say that something must be done. Of course. if they come in as tenants, we can handle the situation fairly easily. But when they get a deed, that's another matter. Be sure to get us straight on that. We want to be fair and do what's right."

Charles S. Duke, a Harvard graduate, former lieutenant of company G, 8th Illinois infantry and a civil engineer in the bridge division of the city department of public works, expresses the view of his people as follows:

"All attempts at segregation bring only discord and resentful opposition. The bombing of the homes of colored citizens is futile. This will neither intimidate any considerable number of them nor stop their moving into a given district. The most certain result is bitter racial antagonism.

"White citizens must be educated out of all hysteria over actual or prospective arrival of colored neighbors. All colored citizens do not make bad neighbors, although in some cases they will not make good ones. It is of the greatest importance, however, both to white and colored people, that real estate dealers should cease to make a business of commercializing racial antagonisms."

During the series of bomb explosions from February 5 to June 13 the police made no arrests. On June 13 they took into custody James Macherol of 4945 South State street and James Turner of 8948 Parnell avenue. The charges were bomb throwing, malicious mischief and carrying explosives without authorization. Their cases have been granted two continuances in Judge Gemmlll's court. Turner is a clerk in the real estate office of Dean & Meagher, 320 East 51st street.

Habeas corpus proceedings in behalf of Turner were unsuccessful in a hearing before Judge Pam. One continuance in the Hyde Park court was granted on the plea of the defendant's attorney that an alibi witness had gone for a two weeks' vacation in Minnesota.

In the series of bombings there is little or nothing to indicate a motive to destroy life. In one case a child was killed. The police have evidence that in the flat next door an Italian girl was to be married and jealous suitors had sent threats of violence. The theory is that the dynamiters put the bomb on the wrong doorstep.

Chapter 5

V

DEMAND FOR NEGRO LABOR

The demand for colored workers took a slump when the armistice was signed. And the slump went on till April. Then things began to look up. Now there has come a strong movement toward the conditions that held good while the war was on.

At the office of the Chicago Urban league, 3032 South Wabash avenue, where a branch of the United States Employment service is maintained, the office force was finding work for 1,700 to 1,800 men and women each month before the armistice was signed. This figure dropped to 500 in April. In the week ended June 14, Secretary T. Arnold Hill, colored man and graduate of New York university, reports 249 men and thirty-four women, a total of 285, placed. He comments:

"At this rate we should place 1,132 persons a month, as compared with 500 or 600 during the three months period previous."

The following is a specimen of the demand for colored workers on one day in June: Quartermaster's corps, U. S. A., twenty-five men at 45 cents an hour; National Malleable Casting Company, twenty men at 40 cents an hour; South-eastern Coal Company, forty men at piece rates; C, B. & Q. railroad company, ten men at 45 cents an hour; Camp Custer, two hundred men at 45 cents an hour; railroad workers for the state of Washington, fifty men at 45 cents an hour; Turbell Ice Cream company, four men at $19 a week.

A bulletin of the office for June 25 states:

"Unskilled work is plentiful. Jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, in light factories and packing houses, keep up a steady demand for semi-skilled laborers."

During 1918 there was a total of 30,000 applications for jobs, and 10,600 persons were placed.

It is believed a record somewhat like this will be maintained again this year; that is, a steady influx of colored population, almost entirely from southern states, will keep on coming and will be absorbed by northern industry. The amount of this influx will not be as large as in the last year or two, but it is expected to be steady. It will have the same steady flow, according to men closely in touch with it, as the stream of immigration from Europe that kept coming to America's shores with such periodic certainty before the war.

Among large employing interests as well as in both white and colored labor circles the expectation is that the northern labor supply will be constantly replenished from the south. The reasons for this are found in conditions described by the immigration and inspection service of the department of labor in a report not as yet made public. From Dr. George Edwin Haynes, a colored man who took a master's degree at Yale and Ph. D. at Columbia, and who is a director of negro economics in the department of labor, comes an advance report on these conditions, as follows:

"Among alien residents in our country large numbers intend to return to their native land. The principal cause is a desire to learn what has befallen their families. Many aliens told investigators they had not heard from their families in four years; that they had sent money home, but had no means of knowing whether it was received or not. Another cause is a desire to ascertain and settle estates of relatives killed during the war.

"Unemployment is still severe in some sections and there is also a desire on the part of many foreigners to return to the land just freed from German or Austrian domination in the belief that opportunities will be better in the new democracies than in the United States.

"In many cities investigation shows that fully 50 per cent of the aliens intend to go back to Europe. A large number of these expect eventually to return to the United States, but many say they will not come back. The clergyman of one foreign church with 1,600 parishioners expects not more than 100 will remain in this country. In an Indiana city with a large Roumanian population, from 40 to 50 per cent want to return to their homeland, Transylvania. Few Poles in the same city expect to return, but 150 of the 600 Serbians wish to go, and it was said that if unemployment became more serious, this number would be increased.