… It is about the most dangerous thing that we have in the city. Whether the police could not stop them at the time of the riot on the Monday when they went down Forty-seventh Street with firearms showing in their hands in autos (a young man living with us can give you his affidavit on it) and shouting as they went, "We'll get those niggers!" I don't suppose anybody would want to say, but the fact remains that nobody did stop them. They went across Halsted Street towards State Street. Four policemen were there and they never stopped them at all.
Miss Jane Addams, of Hull-House, also described to the Commission the way in which the ward politicians are responsible for these clubs. She said:
The politicians have had a new trick the last few years all over the city. They pay rent, as Miss McDowell said, for clubs of boys below the voting age. The politician used to take care of the young voter and the boy nearly a voter, but now he comes down to boys of thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and begins to pay their rent and give them special privileges and keeps the police off when they are gambling. The whole boy problem is very much more mixed up with these—I won't call them gangs, but they are clubs with more or less political affiliations. They are not always loyal to their political boss, but he expects them to be and they are, more or less.
The gangs and "athletic clubs" became more boldly active in the spring of 1919. On the night of June 21, five weeks before the riot, there were two wanton murders of Negroes by gangs of white hoodlums. One of the Negroes was Sanford Harris, the other Joseph Robinson. There is no evidence that either had been offensive in any way, yet they were deliberately killed by gangs. There is evidence that the gangs in the neighborhoods of these crimes had spread such fear among Negro residents that murders of this kind were not unexpected.
Harris lived on Dearborn Street between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh streets. About 11:30 p.m. on June 21 he escorted from his home to a street car at State and Fifty-seventh streets a woman friend who had been calling on his wife. A Negro man, woman, and child alighted from this car, and Harris walked behind them west on Fifty-seventh Street on his way home. A number of white youths approached the man, woman, and child, one of the gang saying, "Let's get that nigger," referring to the man. Because of the child's presence they were allowed to pass unmolested.
Then the gang caught sight of Harris, who started to run across a vacant lot toward his home. A shot was fired and Harris fell after going a short distance. He died at the Cook County Hospital from peritonitis due to the bullet wound.
A woman living near Fifty-seventh and Dearborn streets caught hold of one of the gang who had a pistol in his hand. A plain-clothes policeman appeared, and she called upon him to arrest the gangster who, she said, had shot Harris. The detective merely asked how she was able to pick out the man who had fired the shot. Apparently he ignored the fact that the man held a revolver in his hand, nor does it appear that he even looked to see whether it had been recently discharged.
A Mrs. T——, who lived above the saloon at the northwest corner of State and Fifty-seventh streets, had witnessed the assault on Harris from her back porch. When other plain-clothes men came upon the scene, she told them that the gang had hidden under the viaduct on Fifty-seventh Street west of Dearborn, but there were no arrests and apparently no attempts to make any.
Earlier the same evening, an altercation had taken place between a number of white boys from sixteen to twenty years of age and Thomas Johnson, a Negro who, with a Mrs. Moss, conducted a store next to a saloon at State and Fifty-seventh streets. The boys had been loafing outside the door and using foul language. Johnson remonstrated with them and finally got a stick and started after them. A number of other Negroes aided in driving off the boys, who, as they left, threatened to "get a gang and come back and get you." It is thought that this was the gang that killed Harris.
Joseph Robinson, the other Negro killed that same night, had lived at 514 West Fifty-fourth Place. He was forty-seven years of age, a laborer for the Union Coal Company, and had a wife and six children, the oldest seventeen years of age. He was attacked by a gang at Fifty-fifth Street and Princeton Avenue, apparently without provocation, and received knife wounds in the back and left leg. He died from shock and hemorrhages on June 23.
A man named Morden, who lived at 5713 Drexel Avenue, testified at the Robinson inquest that he had met a gang of from fifteen to thirty men at Fifty-fifth Street and Shields Avenue about a block from Princeton Avenue. He said the gang was walking rapidly east and divided to pass him. He was not far away when Robinson was attacked. The Negro had evidently been coming in the opposite direction, west on Fifty-fifth Street (Garfield Boulevard) and the assault began the instant he met the gang. Morden heard a shot fired and saw Robinson stagger across the street to a candy store. He saw several men rush forward and help Robinson in the door as the gang scattered. Morden declared that several of the gang carried clubs, and that he saw several of these during the assault.
Nicholas Gianakas, who conducted the candy store at 5458 Princeton Avenue, into which the wounded man had run, testified that he heard the shot and saw people outside running in all directions. He saw Robinson coming in the door with blood running off him. Presently Robinson got up and went outside to sit on the curb. Gianakas called up the police station for an ambulance. He saw no weapons in the hands of any of the crowd outside and recognized none of them. He heard people saying that a mob had come from "the Yards."
Peter Paul Byrne, a patrolman, testified that he had been called from his beat at Fifty-fifth and State streets by a man in an automobile, who drove him to the candy store. There he also telephoned for an ambulance, then went out and rounded up "some kids" on suspicion. There was a big crowd around, he said, men, women, and children.
One man testified at the inquest that an acquaintance spoke of having seen a Greek run out of the candy store and hit Robinson on the head with a hammer or hatchet. But this acquaintance, when called to testify, denied the story.
Captain Caughlin, in charge of the police of that precinct, testified that a number of men had been arrested on suspicion, but all of them had been discharged because none of them knew anything about the matter. People had been running in every direction, he said, there had been a good deal of commotion, and he seemed to think it would have been virtually impossible for the police to find any of the guilty persons.
C. L. McCutcheon, a Negro railway postal clerk, living at 517 West Fifty-fourth Place, testified at the inquest that he had been threatened by mobs, that a gang over on the boulevard had so terrorized the fifteen or twenty "colored boys" in the neighborhood for a long time that none of them dared to go about alone; that he himself had two boys who would not go on Halsted Street for $10 a trip.
Following the killing of Harris and Robinson notices were posted along Garfield Boulevard and some neighboring streets saying that the authors of the notices would "get" all the "niggers" on July 4, 1919. These notices also called for help from sympathizers. They predicted that there would be a street-car strike on the appointed day, and that then they expected to run all Negroes out of the district. Some witnesses at the inquest stated that the Negroes of the district, who up to that time had done nothing to protect themselves, were advised by friendly whites to "prepare for the worst," as trouble could scarcely be avoided.
2. RACIAL OUTBREAK IN WAUKEGAN
May 31 and June 2, 1920
Waukegan, Illinois, thirty-six miles north of Chicago and near the Great Lakes Naval Training Station of the United States Navy, was the scene of two riotous attacks during the nights of May 31 and June 2, 1920, on a lodging-house for Negroes, by bands of recruits on leave from the Naval Training Station. No lives were lost, and only two persons were hurt, neither of them seriously.
These outbursts scarcely classify as race riots. The chief motive seems to have been a desire for excitement on the part of young and active
