WHITES STONING NEGRO TO DEATH
Actual photograph of the killing of a Negro by the mob shown above after chasing him into his home.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE POLICE
He was knocked from the stairway by a brick. Two men are here shown hurling bricks at the dying Negro.
A judge of the municipal court said in testimony before the Commission: "They seemed to think they had a sort of protection which entitled them to go out and assault anybody. When the race riots occurred it gave them something to satiate the desire to inflict their evil propensities on others."
Besides shouting as they rode down the streets in trucks that they were out to "get the niggers," they defied the law in other ways. When the militia men came on the scene on the fourth day of the riot, they testified to trouble with these gangsters. One of the colonels testified before the Commission: "They didn't like to be controlled. They would load up heavy trucks with rowdies and try to force through the lines. They'd come tooting their horns and having back pressure explosions like gatling guns."
Some of the "athletic club" gangsters had criminal records. L —— W —— was accused of being one of the leaders of the gang around Forty-seventh and Wells streets. He himself said boastfully, "I have been arrested about fifteen times for 'disorderly' and never was arrested with a knife or a gun." Several witnesses said they had seen him during the riot one night leading the mob and brandishing a razor and the next night waving a gun. He was not arrested. D —— H ——, seventeen years old, was identified as being active in the rioting near Forty-seventh Street and Forrestville Avenue. His defense was that he was not closer to the Negro assaulted than across the street, but because he was arrested the year before for a "stick-up" people looked "funny" at him when anything happened. R —— C —— was accused of having been implicated in the arson cases on Shields Avenue. When his mother was interviewed, she said she knew nothing of the rioting, but said her son was at the time in the county jail, "but not for that." W —— G —— was identified many times as having taken part in the arson on Wentworth Avenue. He was indicted for both arson and conspiracy to riot. Two years before the riot he had been arrested for larceny.
All who discussed gangs before the Commission said that most of the members were boys of seventeen to twenty-two years of age. Witnesses before the coroner's juries testified to the youth of the participants in mobs. Many of the active assailants of street cars were boys. In the case of the Negro Hardy who was killed on a street car, it was said that the murderers were not over twenty years, and many were nearer sixteen. In the raids in the Ogden Park district the participants were between the ages of fifteen and twenty. The raid just west of Wentworth Avenue, where a number of houses were much damaged, was perpetrated by boys of these ages. The attacking mob on Forty-third Street near Forrestville Avenue, was led by boys of eighteen to twenty-one. The only two hoodlums caught participating in the outrages in the "Loop," the downtown business district, were seventeen and about twenty-one. Most of those arrested on suspicion in the arson cases were taken before the boys' court. Negroes involved in many cases as assailants were also youthful. The young Negro boys who killed Lazzeroni were fourteen to eighteen; those who killed Pareko and Perel were about sixteen.