The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

Editorials are supposed to concern those topics that are most important to the community in which they are written. No one can deny the importance of the race riots that disgraced the name of fair America's Capital during the present week; yet two of the leading daily papers of the city found everything to fill their editorial columns but the proper attempts to discourage mob violence and a disposition to place the blame where it justly belongs. The rioting, in itself, was a deplorable disgrace, but a greater disgrace is that the daily newspapers should have encouraged the rioting by the glaring, ugly headlines that they gave it, rather than discourage the riots in editorials.

The National Defender and Sun replied to an editorial of the Chicago Tribune:

In a recent edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which calls itself the world's greatest newspaper, in discussing the recent race riot in Chicago, it had this to say: "Can the two races continue to live in peace in Chicago without segregation? We have for some time criticized the South for its treatment of its black citizens. We believe since the race riot in Chicago that segregation, separate cars, will be the only cure to prevent race riots in the future." We are very much surprised at the statement of the Chicago Tribune. Does the world's greatest newspaper forget that Atlanta, Ga., Memphis, Tenn., Arkansas and Texas, had great race riots, and that all of the above-named states have their Jim Crow laws and segregated district?

The New York Age had this to say:

So much clamor and bad blood have been aroused by the repeated charge of assaults attempted upon women in the city of Washington, that more than ordinary significance attaches to a news item found tucked away in an inconspicuous position on an inside page of the Washington Times. It was headed: "Woman Now Denies She Was Attacked," and read as follows: "The case of an alleged attack on Mrs. Minnie Franklin, 1361 K. Street Southeast, by two Negroes near Fifteenth and H. Sts., Northeast, Thursday night, was closed last night when according to detectives, the woman said the story was a fabrication. Several headquarters detectives questioned the woman yesterday and then went over the ground where the alleged attack was supposed to have occurred, but could find no evidence of a struggle."

This reported case of "assault" had "scare" headlines at the time it was supposed to have occurred, and it looked as if the daily papers were trying to provoke another riot. Later, by the admission of the accuser, the police and the press, the charge was shown to be groundless. Time and again these charges of assaults have been shown to be "faked," and the most credulous should be brought to see the necessity of searching investigation before pronouncing the accused guilty. Hysteria, by newspaper suggestion, may be at the foundation of many a case of reported "assault."

Charges of southern propaganda in the North.—A wide distinction has been made by Negro observers between the Washington and Chicago riots, the former being called a typical southern, and the latter a typical northern, riot. Reasons for this are given in the different forms of incentive to rioting. The Washington reasons were largely sentimental and bore a striking resemblance to the Atlanta riot about 1906. Reports of attacks on white women, played up in the newspapers, were sufficient to set the current going. The sentiment of the South is said to have been behind this outbreak. Said the Chicago Defender:

It is easy to see that the southern white man is at the bottom of race riots in the northern cities to which we have migrated in recent years.... It is idle to suppose that the black man was the only migrator from the South; every northern community is practically overrun with southern whites of both sexes. In many of the northern cities a majority of the white women employed as clerks and saleswomen in department stores, telephone operators and other fields of industry are from the South. In every place where men are utilized, including public officials, judges and prosecuting attorneys, some of them are also from the South.

Remedies.—The Chicago Defender said:

To emphasize the fact that no self-respecting citizen had anything to do with the disgraceful affairs recently witnessed here and in Washington, thousands of circulars have been distributed by our people and to our people filled with good, wholesome advice as to being good, law-abiding citizens. Our only salvation lies in harmony, and both elements must come to understand that each is necessary to the other, and that with all pulling together, democracy for America will no longer be a theory, but a reality.