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

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

7. RUMORS OF ATROCITIES

Of the type of rumor which has had effect upon the sentiments of Negroes concerning the Chicago riot, the following quotations from a pamphlet entitled The Chicago Race Riots, by Austin D. N. Sutton, a Negro, provide a good example:

In an investigation made personally by me, beginning about five o'clock Wednesday afternoon, July 30, until far into the evening, visiting the districts from Forty-seventh Street, East to Indiana Avenue, West to Wentworth Avenue, South to Fifty-fifth Street, I found a little short street between Forty-eighth and Fifth Avenue called Swan Street, that is not easily located, and very little known by the general public. Eye-witnesses said that men, women and children were being attacked and killed and thrown into the sewer, and no account of their whereabouts has ever been given.

I found about twenty refugees who had been run away from their homes on Forty-eighth, Forty-ninth and Fifth Avenue, also Wentworth and Princeton avenues. Their homes had been burned, and they were made to flee for their lives. I have the names and addresses of more than one hundred cases investigated, one more horrible case, where a young colored boy was gasolined and burned after having been killed and where colored women in the Stock Yards district were attacked and their breasts cut off. These things were perpetrated by the whites upon peaceful law-abiding blacks, some of whom had been residents for twenty-seven years in that neighborhood.

Thorough inquiries were made by the Commission into these alleged atrocities, and no evidence was found to show that anyone was "gasolined and burned" during the riot or that any colored women's breasts were cut off.

8. RUMORS AND THE MIGRATION

The rumors in circulation in the South at the beginning of the migration of Negroes to the North were responsible for the presence in Chicago of many who heard them. It is hard to conceive how the tale that the Germans were on their way through Texas to take the southern states could have been believed, yet it is reported that this extravagant rumor was taken seriously in some quarters.

On the outskirts of Meridian, Mississippi, a band of gypsies was encamped. The rumor gained circulation that the Indians were coming back to retake their land, lost many years ago. Further it was declared that the United States government was beginning a scheme to transport all the Negroes from the South to break up the Black Belt. Passed from mouth to mouth unrestrainedly, the tale became an established verity for many Negroes.

It was declared on the word of honor of "one in a position to know" that the packing-houses in Chicago needed and would get 50,000 Negro workers before the end of 1917. One explanation of the belief that the South was overrun with labor agents is the fact that Negroes at the South saw in every stranger a man from the North looking for laborers and their families. If he denied it, they thought that he was concealing his identity from the police, and if he said nothing, his silence was regarded as affirmation.

Hundreds of disappointments of prospective migrants were traced to the rumor that a train would leave on a certain date, sometimes after the presence of a stranger in town; they would come to the station prepared to leave, and when no agent appeared, would purchase their own tickets to the North. Wages and privileges in the North were greatly exaggerated. Some men, on being questioned, supposed that it was possible for any common laborer to earn $10 a day and that $50 a week was not unusual. The strength of this belief was remarked by several social agencies in Chicago which attempted to supply migrants with work. The actual wages paid, though much in excess of what they had been receiving, were disappointing. Similarly in the matter of privilege and "rights," it was later discovered by the migrants that unbounded liberty was not to be found in the North. Many cases of grotesque misconduct of newly arrived migrants in Chicago, against which more sober-minded Negroes preached, possibly had root in exaggerated reports of "freedom and privilege" in the North which had reached the South.[94]