Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/62

52 The Defender is the dean of the weekly newspaper group, and it is said to reach more than 100,000 subscribers in southern states. A Carnegie foundation investigator records his belief that the Defender, more than any other one agency, was the cause of the "northern fever" and the big exodus from the south in the last three years. It advocates race pride and race militancy and exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation on lynching, disfranchisement, and all forms of race discrimination.

At some postoffices in the south it was difficult to have copies of the Defender delivered to subscribers. A colored man caught with a copy in his possession was suspected of "northern fever" and other so called disloyalties. Thousands of letters poured into the Defender office asking about conditions in the north.

This situation had a curious political reflex. A rumor arose. It traveled to Chicago and Washington. It said that sinister forces were operating to prevent negroes in the north and particularly in Chicago from returning to their former homes in the south. Down south the rumor traveled and was published to the effect that thousands of colored men and women were walking the streets of Chicago, hungry and without shoes, begging for transportation to Dixie, the home of the cotton blossoms that they were longing to see again.

Lieut. W. L. Owen of the military intelligence service at Washington was sent to Chicago to investigate. He went to Dr. George C. Hall, a leader in several colored organizations, and asked, "What is this undercurrent that is keeping the negroes in the north?" Dr. Hall answered, "There isn't any undercurrent. Everything is in the open in this case. The trouble started when the Declaration of Independence was written. It says that every man has