The Negro in Chicago - A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago Commission on Race Relations
Lieutenant James McGann and a squad of police rescued the Negroes, who shortly afterward sought other quarters.
Detectives learned the identity of thirty of the boys, some of whom confessed. With their parents they were compelled to appear at the Stock Yards police station and pay for the damage inflicted.
The death of a white man, wrongly thought to have been murdered by Negroes, led to rioting on the night of July 3, 1917, in which a party of white men in an automobile fired upon a group of Negroes at Fifty-third and Federal streets. Apparently no one was hit. Earlier in the evening Charles A. Maronde, a saloon-keeper at 5161 South State Street, had been found dead following an altercation with Negroes whose passage through his premises had irritated him. Two shots were fired, but it was not proved whether by Maronde or by the Negroes. A coroner's jury found that he had died of heart disease.
In July and August, 1917, there were minor outbreaks of trouble between Negroes and naval recruits from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. In some instances recruits and in others Negroes were reported to be the aggressors.
When organized gangs took part in clashes the results were more serious. A typical case started in the Kohler saloon at South State and Fifty-first streets on May 27, 1919, two months before the riot.
A group of about ten white men entered the saloon together. When a Negro came in and called for a drink, one of the whites knocked him down and kicked him out of the front door. Arming himself with brickbats, the Negro called on the whites to come out. The gang crossed to another saloon on the opposite corner, and when they left it shortly afterward, they carried revolvers. They then beat the Negro, cutting his head. Dr. Homer Cooper, whose office is above the Kohler saloon, and one of his patients, Michael Pantaliono, witnessed the affray.
Roscoe C. Johnston, a Negro plain-clothes man who had been on the police force only four days, was told of the trouble by a citizen and found the gang in the second saloon. As he approached, Mart. Flannigan drew a revolver. Johnston called two plain-clothes men, who chanced to be outside, to summon a patrol wagon, then followed the gang back to the Kohler saloon and disarmed and arrested Flannigan. Johnston found three automatic revolvers behind the bar in the saloon and arrested three more of the men for carrying concealed weapons. Later six more of the men were taken when the patrol wagon returned to Kohler's, including Patten, the bartender.
The cases of these ten men were dismissed when they came to trial a week later before Judge Grant; lack of evidence was the reason given. Flannigan explained that he carried the gun to protect himself while taking money to the bank. These young men were said by onlookers to be members of "Ragen's Colts."
"Ragen's Colts" were frequently identified with lawlessness and specific clashes before and during the riot. They are typical of the gangs and "athletic clubs" which were responsible for much disorder, including attacks upon Negroes. This organization was sponsored by Frank Ragen, a politician whose record and methods have long offended the decent citizenship of Chicago. As a member of the Board of Cook County Commissioners, he allied himself with a spoils-seeking majority against which two or three public-spirited members waged a courageous struggle. His participation in the Board's deliberations was marked by such conduct as the hurling of a large record book and inkwells at members who opposed the "ring."
As part of his political following he gathered about him the young hoodlums who make up an important element of the club on which he bestowed his name. Ragen's influence has often been able to protect the "Colts" from punishment for criminal acts, including the persecution of Negroes.
Other "athletic" and "social" clubs, though not so notorious, have been of a like nature. Miss Mary McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Social Settlement, told the Commission that she knew of five such clubs composed of young men between seventeen and twenty-two:
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.
Joseph Robinson, the other Negro killed that same night, had lived at 514 West Fifty-fourth