Judge Kickham Scanlan:
Negroes are more likely to be arrested on suspicion than white persons. If you will tell me why race prejudice exists in this world, I will tell you why this is so. I don't think the police are quite as careful with reference to the rights of the colored man as with the white man. I think they hesitate a little longer when a white man is involved; I am certain that it is so.
State's Attorney Maclay Hoyne:
In the race riots, the police arrested almost exclusively Negroes, and practically no white men.
General Leroy T. Steward:
Recently there have come to Chicago from the South large numbers of colored men who have formerly lived in the country and are not accustomed to city environments. These men have largely been employed at the Stock Yards and, being unknown to the police, there is concerning them naturally a greater suspicion than would attach to the white man who had lived for a greater length of time in the same district, and who also would be more easily identified and traced, if need be, and he would not, therefore, perhaps, be arrested but simply be observed, while the police would, no doubt, feel if they permitted the colored man to pass on at the time, they would lose him completely. This would seem to me to be the real basis of the feeling that has maintained on the part of these men, that they are discriminated against as compared with the whites.
Another matter in this same connection that no doubt has a bearing on the subject is that these same men who have been accustomed to rather close surveillance in the South, seem to feel that when they come to the North they must conduct themselves in a manner to evidence to all concerned that they have equal rights of every kind and character, with the result that they sometimes are guilty of unnecessarily accentuating these matters, and thus bringing on disputes which occasion bad feeling and perhaps lead to disturbances resulting in arrest.
Dr. Herman C. Adler:
Repeatedly colored men have been convicted on evidence which I know perfectly well would not have been satisfactory in white cases. I know that was so in the case of the East St. Louis riot where a colored man was sent down to the Southern Illinois Penitentiary for participating in the riots on the charge of murder. Even the prosecuting office, on reviewing the facts, a year later, admitted he did not believe the evidence sufficient. If that had been a white man the chances are that he would not have been convicted upon that evidence.
We had the same thing here in Chicago: a colored man sent to the penitentiary on a charge of attempted rape where the identification was made by a child of six or eight years who picked him out of a crowd under suspicion. No such evidence ought to be accepted. We know there is prejudice, and when there is prejudice we know the person against whom the prejudice is directed has a hard time.