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

by Chicago Commission on Race Relations

Especially before the war they were always under obligation to some politician for renting a store and paying the initial expenses of their clubs. That's what started them, and it has come to be quite the fashion to get an empty store with big panes of glass on which they like to put their names. I am speaking now of "back of the Yards" conditions.

The Ragen Club is mostly Irish-American. The others are from the second generation of many nationalities. I don't think they have deliberate criminal desires. I think they get into these ways, and then they are used and exploited often by politicians.... It is about the most dangerous thing that we have in the city. Whether the police could not stop them at the time of the riot on the Monday when they went down Forty-seventh Street with firearms showing in their hands in autos (a young man living with us can give you his affidavit on it) and shouting as they went, "We'll get those niggers!" I don't suppose anybody would want to say, but the fact remains that nobody did stop them. They went across Halsted Street towards State Street. Four policemen were there and they never stopped them at all.

Miss Jane Addams, of Hull-House, also described to the Commission the way in which the ward politicians are responsible for these clubs. She said:

The politicians have had a new trick the last few years all over the city. They pay rent, as Miss McDowell said, for clubs of boys below the voting age. The politician used to take care of the young voter and the boy nearly a voter, but now he comes down to boys of thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and begins to pay their rent and give them special privileges and keeps the police off when they are gambling. The whole boy problem is very much more mixed up with these—I won't call them gangs, but they are clubs with more or less political affiliations. They are not always loyal to their political boss, but he expects them to be and they are, more or less.

The gangs and "athletic clubs" became more boldly active in the spring of 1919. On the night of June 21, five weeks before the riot, there were two wanton murders of Negroes by gangs of white hoodlums. One of the Negroes was Sanford Harris, the other Joseph Robinson. There is no evidence that either had been offensive in any way, yet they were deliberately killed by gangs. There is evidence that the gangs in the neighborhoods of these crimes had spread such fear among Negro residents that murders of this kind were not unexpected.

Harris lived on Dearborn Street between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh streets. About 11:30 p.m. on June 21 he escorted from his home to a street car at State and Fifty-seventh streets a woman friend who had been calling on his wife. A Negro man, woman, and child alighted from this car, and Harris walked behind them west on Fifty-seventh Street on his way home. A number of white youths approached the man, woman, and child, one of the gang saying, "Let's get that nigger," referring to the man. Because of the child's presence they were allowed to pass unmolested.

Then the gang caught sight of Harris, who started to run across a vacant lot toward his home. A shot was fired and Harris fell after going a short distance. He died at the Cook County Hospital from peritonitis due to the bullet wound.

A woman living near Fifty-seventh and Dearborn streets caught hold of one of the gang who had a pistol in his hand. A plain-clothes policeman appeared, and she called upon him to arrest the gangster who, she said, had shot Harris. The detective merely asked how she was able to pick out the man who had fired the shot. Apparently he ignored the fact that the man held a revolver in his hand, nor does it appear that he even looked to see whether it had been recently discharged.

A Mrs. T——, who lived above the saloon at the northwest corner of State and Fifty-seventh streets, had witnessed the assault on Harris from her back porch. When other plain-clothes men came upon the scene, she told them that the gang had hidden under the viaduct on Fifty-seventh Street west of Dearborn, but there were no arrests and apparently no attempts to make any.

Earlier the same evening, an altercation had taken place between a number of white boys from sixteen to twenty years of age and Thomas Johnson, a Negro who, with a Mrs. Moss, conducted a store next to a saloon at State and Fifty-seventh streets. The boys had been loafing outside the door and using foul language. Johnson remonstrated with them and finally got a stick and started after them. A number of other Negroes aided in driving off the boys, who, as they left, threatened to "get a gang and come back and get you." It is thought that this was the gang that killed Harris.