CHICAGO RACE RIOTS

Otago Witness, Issue 3430, 9 December 1919, Page 47

CHICAGO RACE RIOTS

(Chicago "Saturday Blade," August 2.)

Rioting between blacks and whites, following a long series ol clashes in the residence districts on the south side, resulted in tiie kiUmg of 30 or 40 persons and tne wounding oi at least 200 in Chicago this week beiore the police, backed by 3500 soldiers, quelled the disorders and had the city under control. The orgy of hate has been smouldering for montlis. White residents of certain sections of the city objected to the encroachments of negroes who bought or rented property near them. Efforts to drive out the blacks proving futile, bombs were employed in somo instances to blow up their homes. Finally the feeling culminated in a series of sharp street encounters between small bands of blacks and whites, and rapidly these minor quarrels became full-sized riots.

With the whole end of the city aroused the ill-feeling burst into flame and rioting, looting, and arson became the general thing. Houses were burned, fights were in progress on every corner, and the streets were filled with wounded. Women and children were not spared, telephones were put out of commission, all traffic was stopped, and rapidly the hospitals became congested with the injured. Despite the police guard thrown about the district, the officers rushing to every spot where riotiDg was in progress, the trouble continued. When the mobs began burning houses of negroes the fire department was called upon, but was unable to cope with all the fires. Torches and exElosive chemicals were thrown into the omes of blacks', and when the panicstricken residents fled the mobs chased fchem, beat them, or killed them. Whites stormed the police stations where the blacks were held, bent on lynching them, but were driven back by the police. Although early in the rioting the trouble seemed to be confined largely to the black belt, it assumed serious proportions when hoodlums invaded the loop where all the big stores are located and slew one black man. attacked others, and compelled others

to flee. RIOTING IN DOWN-TOWN STREETS

The first fatality in the loop came early in the morning, and within two hours the blacks' were retaliating in their neighbourhoods. Word of this reached the downtown district, and a general attack upon negroes ensued. One black man, knocked down and beaten, lay as if dead, but came to after the police had put him in an undertaker's waggon. "It was my only chance to keep on being a live man," he explained. Police reserves, already worn out from rushing about from plaoe to place, met and gave battle to some of the loop rioters, but did not succeed in dispersing them altogether. Street card were stopped, and all coloured passengers yanked off and roughly handled. Porters at their early morning work were seized and beaten. One negro waiter in a restaurant was beaten and loft for dead. He was revived by other employees just before the mob came back and beat him again. From all directions negroes sprinted across and down streets on their way to police headquarters and the city hall, where they demanded protection. It was a hot raoe with a mob in most cases. Often a negro fleeing for protection by the very fact that he was running incited the rougher element to chase him. While the whites were wreaking their hate in this manner the blacks retaliated by breaking into and looting the- stores of white people, attacking every person who was white, stoning street cars, smashing the windows of automobiles and setting fare to houses.

The first killing of the riot was that of a Greek pedlar, who was hauled from his wagon and slashed to death by negroes armed with butcher knives and razors.

News of the death flashed the length and breadth of the disrupted section. Hysterical white men harangued their follows to avengo the killing. Negroes infected for the time by the insanity of the mob, rushed through the streets or drove in motor cars, or waited for street oars, which they attacked with gunfire and stones. Shooting, stabbing, attacks with clubs, rocks, and fists becamo general. The lift of no white man was safe if he ventured too close to the streets dominated by. the negro army. Negroes, captured in sections where whites were in superior numbers, were similarly assaulted. STONED WHITE WOMEN.

A number of white women were stoned and shot during the evening, when street cars on which they were riding were attacked by mobs of negroes. Similarly negressos were stabbed, shot, and beaten when fragments of the whit© armies encountered them in districts where white residents predominated. Two white women, one with an infant in her arms, were attacked and both wounded by negro mobs that fired on a street car. Several thousand men stormed the old Bth Regiment Armoury, in the heart of the riot zone. Doors wiere burst in and hundreds of guns with ammunition were taken by the mob. Police rushed to tlu scene, fired into the mob and finally drove it from the armoury. According to re ports, more than 50 pec-sons were shot or otherwise injured. While the killing of the Greek pedlar was the first of the riots, at almost the same time clashes in other parts of tlic afteeted district were taking place, and quickly assumed fatal results. At one ot the Lako Michigan bathing beaches a small coloured boy crossed the line whirl! divides the white and the black bathers. A white man threw a stone and hit him on the head. The boy was said to have drowned, and speedily the blacks attacked the white bathers. •STONED WHITE WORKMEN.

Another outbreak took place in a vacant lot where about 50 negroes gathered and threw bricks at trucks loaded with while workers which were passing. The whites promptly got otf the trucks, picked up the nearest missiles, and the fi;rht was on. It surged up and down streets, across lots, into houses and was stopped only after heavy forces of police had charged repeatedly into the mob. But the. mob spirit was aflame find the looting of stores and attacks upon persons of the other race followed quickly. Automobiles loaded with armed whites began parading through the black belt at top speed, shooting promiscuously at every black person seen. Soon the blacks were do !"■• '*'•■-. •-- '*'■■■' JMBMi——^—

antly dasnod here and there, trying to stop the outbreaks as fast as they occurred, and hundreds were arrested and locked up in the police stations Even there the feeling was intense and fights broke out, but lasted,only a few seconds. It is significant that many of the- casualties were policemen who charged into rioters outnumbering them many times. Policemen were shot, beaten, and stoned. UNDERTAKERS THREATENED.

White undertakers refused to acoept the bodies of negro victims. Negro undertakers refused to accept bodies _of whites. Outside every funeral establishment in the affected district threatening crowds stood around, prepared to wreck the morgues if bodies of the other race v/ere accepted. The most serious outbreak began at Thirty-fourth street and Wabash avenue, when Policemen Michael Geary and Nicholas Hughes mat two negroes carrying " You poor white trash," said one of the men, and he hurled a brick at Geary. It passed over the policeman's head. Someone fired a shot. Hughes drew his revolver and fired. The shooting became general. Fifty odd policemen came running up. The two negroes had been reinforced to 200 or more. Bricks flew in every direction. Shots rang l out. WOMAN ROUTS CROWD. % A brick came sailing out of a window of some big apartments. A crowd of negroes rushed up the stairs. On the second floor a white woman with a revolver in hand bade them go down again. They did—quickly. Coloured soldiers who had seen service in France sided Avith the police in quelling this disturbance. The riotng negroes were driven back. They went swiftly, carrying their wounded. They stopped automobiles and wrecked them, and beat up men and women who had been riding in them. Policemen armed with rifles to which bayonets had bsen affixed came _ charging the mob, dispersing them, breaking them up into small knots that fled through alleyways and side streets, shooting as they ran. It was during this riot that a man was dragged from his wagon and stabbed to death. Later a crowd of infuriated white men retaliated by dragging a negro from a truck. They beat him and stabbed him a dozen times. He died in the patrol wagon on the way to the hospital. While scenes such as these were being .enacted in part of the city, in other sections neither black nor whites .seemed excited. Some of them.who live side by side met and chatted as usual and deplored the riots. Tho fueling largely waa manifested in districts'where there has been for the last year or two a great influx of negroes from the south, and these have undertaken to stir up trouble because of race riots in the south, in Washington, D.C., and other places lately.