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 who came up after the mobs had dispersed.
There were others, still children in mind, Negro boys of fifteen, accused of murders. The enormity of their acts faded in the joy of describing their weapons. "Fat had a club; it looked like a police club," said one, "it had leather on it." "And the gun had a little picture of an owl on the side of it," said another describing a patched-up weapon that brought down a white laboring-man who left a widow and eight children.
SCENES FROM FIRE IN IMMIGRANT NEIGHBORHOOD "BACK OF THE YARDS"
