The soldiers of the Eighth Regiment returning from war, 1919
Two bombs exploded in January 1919, both on the doorsteps of real estate offices, one black, one white. No arrests were made.
In mid-February, Judge Alschuler provided a bright moment for those who had the good fortune to be holding jobs in the packinghouses. His second set of awards gave out more wage increases and benefits. Still, white union workers were sour. They appreciated the extra money in their pockets, but they could not let go of the anger they harbored toward those men who reaped the same benefits but refused to join the union. And in their minds, non-union and black were one and the same.
Black leaders were keenly aware of white Chicago’s postwar desire to return to the days of blacks being nearly invisible in the overall fabric of the city. But there was no going back. In mid-March, A. L. Jackson explained to a group of white businessmen the new mindset of the returned black soldier: “[He] is coming back with a consciousness of power hitherto unrealized, a sense of manhood, and a belief in his ability to carry responsibility. He believes that his strength is the same as that of other men.” And more darkly, he warned: “Young men among the negroes . . . are growing up with a suspicion against anything that is white.”
In March, the banker and real estate mogul Jesse Binga was the target of two bombs, one at his real estate office, one at a property on his listings. No arrests were made.
In April, the battle of wills continued in the contest for the mayor’s seat. Big Bill Thompson was running in a tight race for reelection. He had star status in the Black Belt, where Democrats were remembered as the party of the slave-owning southern planters, and Republicans as the freedom fighters. As far as black voters were concerned, Big Bill himself was still the best the Republican Party had to offer—always ready to take a public stand with them against those who would push them to the bottom.
Big Bill also had a lot of enemies. The Irish were incensed by his openly anti-Catholic propaganda. They were also threatenedby his dedication to black causes to the detriment of their own. After his first victory in 1915, Thompson had appointed the black alderman Louis B. Anderson to be his floor leader in the city legislature. Anderson used his power to earmark municipal funds to clean up the Black Belt’s crumbling sewers and streets. He also conducted an investigation of the police department, shining a light on racial discrimination and trumped-up criminal charges against blacks.
Three candidates crowded the field looking to unseat Big Bill. Robert Sweitzer was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Democrat, brother-in-law to a powerful Democratic ward politician. Middle-class progressives, disgusted by the corrupt politics of both Thompson and Sweitzer, threw their weight behind an independent reformer. A fourth candidate, supported by the Poles and Lithuanians, was put up by the Labor Party.
Robert Sweitzer and his wife cast their votes.
The race was heated, with candidates on all sides taking potshots. Approaching election day, Thompson and Sweitzer were running even, the race too close to call. Ragen’s Colts and other athletic clubs pulled out all the stops for the Democrat, getting out the immigrant vote. On the other side, blacks like Mr. Horton showed their passion for the power of the ballot and came out in large numbers for Big Bill.
By the end of election night, it was clear that although he had garnered less than 38 percent of the vote, Thompson had been elected. It was also clear that without solid black support, he would have lost. In the communities of Packingtown, word went out that the blacks had won. The Democratic Chicago Daily Journal headline read “Negroes Elect Big Bill.” There were still plenty of Democratic aldermen and department heads in city government. But they would now be in competition with the black agenda put forward by the two black aldermen and backed by the power of the Republican mayor.
In April, two bombs exploded, one at a real estate office, one at a private home. No arrests were made.
Employers were eliminating jobs no longer needed now that the war was over. Worker anxiety was at a fever pitch. In the month of May alone, unions across the nation battled with employers in 413 strikes and lockouts. The owners’ access to strikebreakers was knocking the unions’ teeth out.
Despite their victory at the polls, blacks continued to lose jobs to returning white veterans. The black work force in Chicago had fallen from sixty-five thousand in January to fifty thousand in May. The Wabash YMCA leader A. L. Jackson pleaded with Louis Swift and the other packers, disparaging returning immigrant soldiers, referring to them as “hyphenated”—Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and the like—and talking up native-born American black workers: “These [black] boys are all good Americans. There are no slackers, no hyphens among them.” Yet black leaders were wary of being manipulated by these same packers. The Defender called them out: “Capital has not played square with us; it has used us as strikebreakers, then when the calm came turned us adrift.”
Union leaders continued to press for unity, but they were talking against a tide of hate and mistrust. Whites wanted to force blacks to join the union. Blacks continued to resist. On the shop floor, fights broke out on a regular basis—barrages of racial and ethnic slurs, sometimes supported by guns and knives. Whites complained of black agitators who physically intimidated union organizers. One white union man accused a black laborer of threatening to split him open with a meat cleaver. Blacks complained of having bricks thrown at them. One man recalled, “Six or seven or eight Polocks [sic] grabbed a colored fellow out there . . . and said, ‘you son-of-a-bitch, you will join the union,’ . . . and one had him by this arm, and the other by this arm, and one fellow had him by the neck.”
The housing shortage continued to grow, compelling more families to push into new neighborhoods. On May 5, a property owners’ association convened a raucous meeting, exhorting white residents to hold the line against the threatening wave moving toward them out of the Black Belt. Statement upon statement echoed the cry of one real estate agent, who challenged neighbors to “stand together block by block and prevent such invasion.”
Four bombings followed. The home of a prominent black family named Harrison was one of the casualties. From the moment in March when the family moved in, there was trouble. Insults hurled at the new neighbors were a daily affair. But on May 16, things got worse. Mrs. Harrison was in charge while her husband was away on business when a black janitor passed along a tip: Word on the street was that neighbors were planning to bomb the Harrison house. The police seemed uninterested, so Mrs. Harrison decided to protect herself. Her private security guard was checking the rear the following night when an explosion ripped through her front door and window. No one owned up to seeing anything. Now taking her more seriously, police were dispatched to keep watch. The following night, another bomb was thrown onto the Harrisons’ roof from the vacant apartment next door. Someone had unlocked the door for the bomber. The police failed to question anyone. No arrests were made.
A poster warns whites about the consequences of voting for Bill Thompson.
On this issue, Big Bill Thompson was no help. Twice, a delegation of black ministers tried to file a complaint about the bombings but was not allowed to see the mayor. The Defender reflected frustrations in the community: “The value of human life is cheaply held in these turbulent times . . . and the authorities constituted to preserve law and order seem helpless to cope with the situation. Chicago . . . is having a reign of this terror.”
That spring and summer, once again the pattern of conflict spilled over into the parks and beaches. Blacks who tried to swim in white areas were turned away by white bathers and beach policemen; in parks, blacks were pelted with rocks.
The union continued to preach unity. In early June, John Kikulski spoke to an interracial group, saying, “Polish, Irish, Lithuanian, and in fact every race, color, creed, and nationality is to be included. . . . While there will be varied differences in our physical makeup and thoughts, there is one thing which we all hold in common, and that is our right to a living wag
e, and our rights in the pursuit of happiness as American citizens.”
John Kikulski.
Throughout the month of June, the union wooed workers, setting up a band on a flatbed outside the Great Gate of the Union Stock Yard, greeting workers with lively tunes. As laborers started the trek home, union organizers—white and black—stood ready to sling a friendly arm around each worker’s shoulders and lead him toward a line of trucks set up to whisk workers to union headquarters to sign up and pin on a button that read “100% Union or Bust!” The union used its newspaper, the New Majority, to foster goodwill between the Irish and blacks, where friction was the greatest. One edition highlighted a black-initiated petition calling on President Wilson to give Ireland a voice in determining international policy on postwar issues.
In the neighborhoods, white and black gangs were facing off with greater frequency. On June 15, boys scuffled in Washington Park, the large leafy park closest to both Packingtown and the Black Belt. Six days later, police came running to the park on a tip that the white gangs were out to kill all the blacks, but at the last minute, the gangs had dispersed and were roaming the city in smaller packs. By the end of the night, two black men were dead. The first was shot and killed minutes before midnight, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bystander was able to grab the perpetrator and call for police, but when police arrived to find the assailant still standing there, revolver in hand, they let him go. The Defender headline screamed, “Ragan’s [sic] Colts Start Riot.”
A week later on June 30, two black brothers were chased off a streetcar and run down; one lived, one died. Days later, flyers flapped on posts in the Black Belt threatening to “get all the niggers on July 4th.”
The Fourth of July passed quietly. The Defender commented, “NO ‘RACE RIOTS’ on the Fourth of July, what do you know about that?” But hysteria had taken hold. Reverend Carey preached to black worshipers in several black churches: “Be ye also ready.” Terrified blacks began to carry knives for self-protection.
Meanwhile, the union was making some progress. Black Local 651 showed more than six thousand active members. A black organizer was optimistic. The union paper reported that he “was singing the blues a few days ago, but now he has a smile so broad that it is almost impossible to believe that such a change could come over a man.”
Louis Swift and the other packers pressed hard to keep the workers from coming together. Using their clout with the downtown police department, they posted three hundred mounted police in the Stock Yard to break up union gatherings.
The union planned a culminating interracial parade for July 6. Leaders envisioned a powerful show of unity, a massive crowd of blacks and whites together parading through the Black Belt, crossing as one over the deadline, celebrating their common bond as laborers. The packinghouse owners pulled out all the stops to shut them down. Complaining to police of potential violence once more, the packers were successful in having the parade permit denied. Union leaders were not to be completely shut down, but the union was forced to scale back its plans, with separate parades for blacks and whites. The parades ended by converging in the park across the street from the Yard.
The interracial crowd exuded optimism. Many carried printed signs that read, “The bosses think because we are of different colors and different nationalities that we should fight each other. We’re going to fool them and fight for a common cause—a square deal for all.” Union and community leaders, four white and three black, gave emotional speeches glorifying the strength of a united laboring class. John Kikulski spoke in Polish, calling for “cooperation between blacks and whites.” The Defender did not participate. T. Arnold Hill spoke in support of the union, but cautioned that the Urban League’s expectation was that the union would not play favorites between the races.
The event was a success. But just two days later, the good feelings evaporated when immigrant workers at the nearby Argo corn refinery walked out and six hundred black nonunion men marched in to take their places. White packinghouse workers in Chicago felt a bond with the Argo immigrants. The strikebreakers at Argo confirmed in the immigrants’ minds that nothing had changed, that blacks could not be trusted. On Friday, July 18, ten thousand packinghouse workers expressed their dissatisfaction by walking off the job. No more waiting for blacks to sign up with the union. The time was now. The men voted to submit demands for increased wages and benefits to the packers on Saturday, July 26, and, barring a satisfactory response, to go out on strike on July 28.
The threat was never acted upon. On Sunday, July 27, the storm that had been building for so long blew the city apart.
John Fitzpatrick addresses a large crowd of packinghouse workers.
SEVENTEEN
Race Riot
WHEN JOHN TURNER HARRIS and his friends left the beach that Sunday afternoon in 1919, they were focused on the tragic death of Eugene Williams. They could not have imagined what would follow.
Back at the lakefront, black bathers stormed from Twenty-Sixth Street to the Twenty-Ninth Street beach. Spotting Officer Callahan, they shouted out for him to arrest Eugene’s murderer, whose name turned out to be George Stauber. Ignoring them, Callahan turned to listen instead to a white man’s complaint against a black man in the crowd. Adding insult to the blacks’ injury, Callahan promptly arrested the black man.
A paddy wagon arrived at the beach to take the black man into custody. The swelling crowd jeered and threw bricks and rocks, and another black man in the crowd, James Crawford, drew a gun and fired it into a group of policemen. A black officer returned fire, bringing Crawford down. And just like that, the crowd entered into an unspoken agreement that guns were fair fighting.
People began to peel off in groups, making their way home. There were clashes between the races along the way. Rumors flew ahead of them, back to the neighborhoods. Around white neighborhoods the story went that the drowned boy was white and the stone thrower was black. In black areas, among stories of Officer Callahan’s villainy was the claim that he had prevented expert swimmers from saving Eugene, and that he had held a gun on black bathers while they were pelted with bricks and stones. People poured out of their homes and into the streets, massing together to get the low-down. What they heard made them see red.
Eugene Williams.
Around nine o’clock, darkness set in with its inherent cloak of anonymity for the lawless. Out in the streets, the rush of unleashed anger was palpable. Ragen’s Colts emptied their clubhouse gun racks and went looking for targets. Terror reigned until three o’clock in the morning, a barrage of beatings, stabbings, and shootings. By the end of Sunday night, two were dead and forty-six were wounded.
Whites and blacks massed at the beach after Eugene Williams was hit by a rock and drowned.
The violence trailed off in the wee hours of Monday morning. The new day dawned hot but quiet. To some, it was an unnatural calm and they didn’t trust it. More than a few black laborers stayed away from work, thinking it too risky to cross into territory where trouble might be waiting. But many men and women in the Black Belt and in Packingtown rose early as usual, scanned out the window for any suspicious activity, and, finding none, turned back to the rooms inside, pulling on shirts, pants, dresses; boiling grits and frying eggs; braiding hair; and packing lunches. With all in order, they set off for the day ahead.
Those blacks who worked in the Union Stock Yard had every reason to be cautious. As they crossed the deadline, they could expect trouble. It was best to move a little faster than usual across train tracks, past saloons and shanty homes, pressing quickly toward the safety of the Yard. Passing under the protection of the Yard’s Great Gate allowed workers a small smile of relief and permission to apply their minds and bodies to the tasks at hand. The violence of the day before was not forgotten but it appeared to have subsided.
A morning train brought Mayor Thompson back into the city from a political junket in Wyoming. He immediately huddled with his police leaders to determine a strategy. A police capt
ain who knew well the animosity between the Black Belt and Packingtown communities was deeply concerned. Reports from his sources indicated that the riot was going to grow, and the Chicago police force was too small to handle it alone. To tamp down on the violence, they would need assistance from the state militia. The city’s police chief thought otherwise, as did the governor’s man. The mayor chose to rely on the police force, moving most officers to the Black Belt. Bars were closed and police were instructed to break up all large gatherings of either whites or blacks on the street.
A group of black leaders, including Ida Wells-Barnett, gathered at Olivet Baptist Church to discuss the black community’s response to the rioting. A committee was formed to lead efforts to protect black people from any further violence.
When the early shifts at the Stock Yard ended midafternoon, those who’d arrived at the crack of dawn prepared to make their way home as usual. They washed and packed their tools and walked out into the blazing heat. The day had gone as well as could be expected. The packinghouse foremen made it quite clear that the prior day’s riot did not merit any discussion or work slowdown. The great assembly line pushed cows and hogs forward at the usual lightning speed, so that workers had no time to turn their thoughts or bodies to anything else. They worked side by side as always, Irish, Lithuanian, black. It seemed that the worst was over.
A Few Red Drops Page 9