The item reads: "Race rioters began to attack white women this afternoon according to report received at the Detective Bureau and the Stock Yards Police Station." The article continues, that Swift & Company had not received any such reports of attacks on their women employees. But farther on the item gives an account of a Swift & Company truck filled with girl employees fired upon by Negroes at Forty-seventh Street and the Panhandle railroad. The driver was reported killed and several of the girls injured.
The juxtaposition of "Death roster is 30" and "Attack white women" gives a wrong impression. The "several girls injured" at Forty-seventh Street evidently refers to the case of Mrs. Mary Kelly. The records of the state's attorney's office also show that Josephine Mansfield was supposed to have been wounded by Harris, et al., but the charge was dropped. She was wounded in the shoulder, according to the police report.
Daily News, July 30:
Alderman McDonough described a raid into the white district the night before by a carload of colored men who passed Thirty-fifth Street and Wallace "shouting and shooting." The gunmen shot down a woman and a little boy who stood close by.
[Note.—No record of such a case.]
Here is the "injury done to women" story as it appeared in the Negro press:
Chicago Defender, August 2:
An unidentified young woman and three-months-old baby were found dead on the street at the intersection of Forty-seventh and Wentworth. She had attempted to board a car there when the mob seized her, beat her, slashed her body to ribbons, and beat the baby's brains out against a telegraph pole. Not satisfied with this one rioter severed her breasts and a white youngster bore it aloft on a pole triumphantly while the crowd hooted gleefully. The whole time this was happening several policemen were in the crowd but did not make any attempt to make a rescue until too late.
Concerning all of these stories it may be stated that the coroner had no cases of deaths of women and children brought before him. There was nothing in the police reports or the files of the state's attorney or hospital reports or the reports of Olivet Baptist Church, which would give any foundation for reports of the killing of a woman and child, white or Negro.
There were other rumors which had the same anger-producing effect as reports of attacks on women. A notable case of this kind was the fatal clash at the Angelus, an apartment house for white people at Thirty-fifth Street and Wabash Avenue, on Monday, July 28 (see [p. 6]). The trouble here grew from four o'clock in the afternoon until it culminated in the shooting at 8:00 p.m. The excitement was stimulated by the rapid spread of various rumors. It was said that a white mob was gathering at Thirty-fifth Street and Wentworth Avenue, only a few blocks from the colored mob which was massed on Thirty-fifth Street from State Street to Wabash Avenue. The rumor was that the white men are armed and prepared to "clean up the 'Black Belt.'" Another rumor had it that a Negro's sister had been killed while coming home from the Stock Yards where she worked. Finally came the rumor that a white person had fired a shot from the Angelus building, wounding a colored boy. The rumor quickly went through the crowd swarming around the building, but no one heard or saw the shooting. A search of the building disclosed no firearms. Police Sergeant Middleton, Negro, described the situation as "everybody trying to tell you something and you couldn't get anything." Another Negro policeman said it was "just a rumor that went around through the crowd and everybody was saying, 'He shot from that window'; I would go to that window and the crowd would say, 'That is the window over there.'"