Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/57

Rh British trades union congress, spoke to the audience, which numbered about 3,000. Probably 2,000 stood in the hot sun three hours while the American Giants (colored) played in the next lot, and the White Sox game was on only two blocks away.

John Riley and C. Ford, organizers carrying authorizations from the American Federation of Labor, were speakers. Ford has personality, rides rough-shod over English grammar, but wins his crowd with homely points such as these:

"If I had any prejudice against a white man in this crowd any more than I've got against a colored man, then I'd jump down here off this platform and break my infernal neck right now."

"You boys know about rassling. You know if you throw a rassler down you know you got to stay down with him if you're going to keep him down: If you don't stay down with him, he'll get up and you got to throw him again."

"You notice there ain't no Jim Crow cars here to-day. That's what organization does. The truth is there ain't no negro problem any more than there's a Irish problem or a Russian or a Polish or a Jewish or any other problem. There is only the human problem, that's all. All we demand is the open door. You give us that, and we won't ask nothin' more of you."

It was a curious equation of human races that stood listening to this talk. Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, Italians and colored men mingled in all sections of the crowd, and every speaker touching the topic of prejudice got the same kind of a response from all parts of the crowd. So they stood in the July afternoon sun, listening as best they could to what they could hear from their orators, while