Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/13

Rh America. It connects directly with a city administration decisive in its refusal to draw the color line, and a mayor whose opponents failed to defeat him with the covert circulation of the epithet of "nigger lover." To such a community the black doughboys came back from France and the cantonment camps. Also it is known that hundreds—it may be thousands—have located in Chicago in the hope of permanent jobs and homes in preference to returning south of Mason and Dixon's line, where neither a world war for democracy, nor the Croix de Guerre, nor three gold chevrons, nor any number of wound stripes, assures them of the right to vote or to have their votes counted or to participate responsibly in the elective determinations of the American republic.

3. Thousands of white men and thousands of colored men stood together during the riots, and through the public statements of white and colored officials of the Stockyards Labor Council asked the public to witness that they were shaking hands as "brothers" and could not be counted on for any share in the mob shouts and ravages. This was the first time in any similar crisis in an American community that a large body of mixed nationalities and races—Poles, Negroes, Lithuanians, Italians, Irishmen, Germans, Slovaks, Russians, Mexicans, Yankees, Englishmen, Scotchmen—proclaimed that they were organized and opposed to violence between white union men and colored union men.

In any American city where the racial situation is critical at this moment, the radical and active factors probably are (1) housing (2) politics and war psychology and (3) organization of labor.

The articles that follow are reprints from the pages of the Chicago Daily News, which assigned the writer to