Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/12

2 any other that has come to his notice during seven years of service as chief prosecuting official.

And I recalled that a few years ago a group of people from the University of Chicago came over into the stockyards district and made a survey. They went into one neighborhood and asked at every house about how the people lived—and died. They found that seven times as many white hearses haul babies along the streets here as over in the lake shore district a mile east. Their statement of scientific fact was that the infant mortality was seven times higher here proportionately, than a mile to the east in a district where housing and wages are different.

So on the one hand we have blind lawless government failing to function through policemen ignorant of Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a theory sanctioned and baptized in a storm of red blood. And on the other hand we have a gaunt involuntary poverty from which issues the hoodlum.

At least three conditions marked the events of violence in Chicago in July, 1919, and gave the situation a character essentially different from the backgrounds of other riots. Here are factors that give the Chicago flare-up historic import:

1. The Black Belt population of 50,000 in Chicago was more than doubled during the war. No new houses or tenements were built. Under pressure of war industry the district, already notoriously overcrowded and swarming with slums, was compelled to have and hold in its human dwelling apparatus more than twice as many people as it held before the war.

2. The Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in