Said the Survey magazine, May 15, 1920: "The custom of newspapers to ridicule the efforts of colored people is a gratuitous insult that they have to meet on every hand."
The New Republic observes editorially: "Race riots within a week of one another occurred in Washington and Chicago.... The press made a race question of individual crime, and the mob, led by marines and soldiers, took up the issue which the press had presented to them."
Negroes are loud in their condemnation of the press throughout the country. Says one Negro newspaper:
Whatever be the cause of the motive, there is apparently a well-organized plan to discredit the race in America and to bring estrangement between fellow-Americans. A short-sighted ... press is contributing to this estrangement by playing upon the passions of the undiscriminating, and thoughtlessly, by its glaring and sensational headlines, emphasizing rumors of alleged crimes by Negroes.
The Associated Negro Press accuses the Associated Press of fostering ill feeling and hatred between whites and Negroes. It says:
The Associated Press (white) ... always in its first paragraph ... attributes the source of trouble to our people "molesting white women." That, the Associated Press knows, is always fuel for the fire of the fury.... It arouses certain elements of whites to indignation by the thoughts of the ever "burly black brutes," and it stirs the people of our group to a state of fighting, mad by the folly of it.
The Philadelphia Tribune, a Negro paper, said: "Daily papers keep up mob sentiment. They continue to fan the riot flames into a destructive blaze."
The method of news handling now in practice in the Chicago Press, white and Negro, appears to contribute in effect to strained relations between the races. This condition prompts a more than casual inquiry into these methods.
A few examples will illustrate. On the night of July 20, 1920, following the demonstration of a group of Negro fanatics, the self-styled "Abyssinians," a prominent newspaper printed in large headlines: "Race Riot—Two Whites Slain." The paper was an extra and widely distributed. At Sixty-third and Halsted streets four Negro ministers returning from a church conference in Gary, Indiana, were set upon by a mob of whites who had merely read the report, and were beaten unmercifully.
On January 23, 1920, the following article appeared in the Chicago Herald-Examiner: