corner of Wabash Avenue and Adams Street and divided the spoils, openly boasting later of having secured $52, a diamond ring, a watch, and a brooch.
Attacks in the "Loop" continued as late as ten o'clock Tuesday morning, Negroes being chased through the streets and beaten. Warned by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, business men with stores on Wabash Avenue came to protect their property. The rioting was reported to the police by the restaurant men. Policemen rescued two Negroes that morning, but so many policemen had been concentrated in and near the "Black Belt" that there were only a few patrolmen in the whole "Loop" district, and these did not actively endeavor to cope with the mob. In the meantime two Negroes were killed and others injured, while property was seriously damaged.
Tuesday's raids marked the peak of daring during the riot, and their subsidence was as gradual as their rise. For the next two days the gangs roamed the streets, intermittently attacking Negro homes. After Tuesday midnight their operations were not so open or so concerted. The riot gradually decreased in feeling and scope till the last event of a serious nature occurred, the incendiary fires back of the Stock Yards.
While there is general agreement that these fires were incendiary, no clue could be found to the perpetrators. Negroes were suspected, as all the houses burned belonged to whites. In spite of this fact, and the testimony of thirteen people who said they saw Negroes in the vicinity before or during the fires, a rumor persisted that the fires were set by white people with blackened faces. One of the men living in the burned district who testified to seeing a motor truck filled with Negroes said, when asked about the color of the men, "Sure, I know they were colored. Of course I don't know whether they were painted." An early milk-wagon driver said that he saw Negroes come out of a barn on Forty-third Street and Hermitage Avenue. Immediately afterward the barn burst into flames. He ran to a policeman and reported it. The policeman said he was "too busy" and "it is all right anyway." One of the colonels commanding a regiment of militia said he thought white people with blackened faces had set fire to the houses; he got this opinion from talking to the police in charge of that district.
Miss Mary McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, which is located back of the Yards, said in testimony before the Commission:
I don't think the Negroes did burn the houses. I think the white hoodlums burned them. The Negroes weren't back there, they stayed at home after that Monday. When we got hold of the firemen confidentially, they said no Negroes set fire to them at all, but the newspapers said so and the people were full of fear. All kinds of mythical stories were afloat for some time.
The general superintendent of Armour & Company was asked, when testifying before the Commission, if he knew of any substantial reason why Negroes were accused of setting fires back of the Yards. He answered:
That statement was originated in the minds of a few individuals, radicals. It does not exist in the minds of the conservative and thinking people of the community, even those living in back of the Yards. They know better. I believe it goes without saying that there isn't a colored man, regardless of how little brains he'd have, who would attempt to go over into the Polish district and set fire to anybody's house over there. He wouldn't get that far.
The controlling superintendent of Swift & Company said he could not say it from his own experience, but he understood there was as much friction between the Poles and Lithuanians who worked together in the Yards as between the Negroes and the whites. The homes burned belonged to Lithuanians. The grand jury stated in its report: "The jury believes that these fires were started for the purpose of inciting race feeling by blaming same on the blacks."
The methods of attack used by Negroes and whites during the riot differed; the Negroes usually clung to individual attack and the whites to mob action. Negroes used chiefly firearms and knives, and the whites used their fists, bricks, stones, baseball bats, pieces of iron, hammers. Among the white men, 69 per cent were shot or stabbed and 31 per cent were beaten; among the Negroes almost the reverse was true, 35 per cent being shot and stabbed and 65 per cent beaten. A colonel in charge of a regiment of militia on riot duty says they found few whites but many Negroes armed.
Arms and ammunition.—The foregoing figures and statements gave some color to the belief persistent during and after the riot that Negroes had stores of arms and ammunition. A lieutenant of police testified before the coroner's jury that he had known in advance that the riot was coming because "there were guns in every house out there; I knew they were there for a purpose." He said he had heard that Negroes had been advised to arm themselves and defend their homes, that the Constitution of the United States provided for that. The state's attorney said before the Commission that prior to the riot he had received reports from detectives of private agencies stating the same thing. He was informed that Negroes readily got firearms from Gary, Indiana, and that porters on the Pullman trains brought them in from outside places. He further stated: "I am very definitely assured of the fact that they were arming and that there were more arms and weapons grouped in that general district loosely termed the 'Black Belt' than any place else, and my information is that conditions are that way now."
During the riot there were frequent rumors that Negroes had broken into the Eighth Regiment Armory for guns and ammunition, but all these rumors were proved false.
Since the riot many tales have been told of stores of arms brought in by Pullman porters and by white prostitutes. Mexicans were reported to be assisting Negroes in the manufacture of bombs and hand grenades. Lists of addresses where ammunition was being stored have been gathered by detectives, but not verified.
The same sort of rumors are found circulating among the Negroes in regard to the arming of whites. It is said that such and such white men have great boxes of guns and ammunition in the cellars of their homes, and that white men are forming shooting clubs for the purpose of attacking Negroes in the event of another riot. There are also widely believed stories that a department store sold guns to white people before the riot but refused to sell to Negroes. It was said that pawn shops sold to white people without permits from the police.
Crowds and mobs.—It may be observed that a crowd is merely a gathering of people while a mob is a crowd with its attention so strongly fixed upon some lawless purpose that other purposes are inhibited and it acts along the line of the one purpose. During the riot many crowds of curiosity seekers were transformed into vicious mobs when exciting rumors circulated and the suggestion of vengeance was made by leaders. Such suggestion was frequently accompanied by some daring act, stimulated by the excitement.
The mob in its entirety usually did not participate actively. It was one in spirit, but divided in performance into a small active nucleus and a large proportion of spectators. The nucleus was composed of young men from sixteen to twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. Sometimes only four would be active while fifty or 150 looked on, but at times the proportion would be as great as twenty-five in 200 or fifty in 300. Fifty is the largest number reported for a mob nucleus. This was in the case of John Mills and five other Negroes who were beaten, dragged off a Forty-seventh Street car and chased, Mills being killed. Here there were three degrees of crowd formation. First came the nucleus of fifty active men who did the beating, chasing, and killing. Closely aiding and abetting them were 300 or 400 others. After the Negroes had been forced off the car and were being hunted through the neighborhood a crowd of about 2,000 gathered and followed the vanguard of attackers and spectators. These were present out of morbid curiosity, but sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the mob not to interfere with the outrages.
The fact that children were frequently a part of mobs is one of the thought-provoking facts of the Chicago riot. Psychologists say that impressions made upon the child mind are forces which mold adult character to a great extent. A number of children, some not more than four or five years old, swarmed in front of the Forty-seventh Street car in the John Mills case and effectively blocked it while men climbed aboard and sought out the Negroes. Children, often witnesses of mob brutality, ran to where Negro victims had fallen and pointed them out to the policemen
