Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/36



is a receiving station that connects directly with every town or city where the people conduct a lynching.

"Every time a lynching takes place in a community down south you can depend on it that colored people from that community will arrive in Chicago inside of two weeks," says Secretary Arnold Hill of the Chicago Urban league, 3032 South Wabash avenue. "We have seen it happen so often that now whenever we read newspaper dispatches of a public hanging or burning in Texas or a Mississippi town, we get ready to extend greetings to people from the immediate vicinity of the scene of the lynching. If it is Arkansas or Georgia, where a series of lynchings is going on this week, then you may reckon with certainty that there will be large representations from those states among the colored folks getting off the trains at the Illinois Central station two or three weeks from to-day."

Better jobs, the right to vote and have the vote counted at elections, no Jim Crow cars, less race discrimination and a more tolerant attitude on the part of the whites, equal rights with white people in education—these are among the attractions that keep up the steady movement of colored people from southern districts to the north.

"Opportunity, not alms," is the slogan of the educated, while the same thought comes over and over again from