Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/7



To record the background of an event, infinitely more disgraceful than that Mexican banditry or Red Terror about which we are all so virtuously indignant, is sufficient reason for republishing these articles by Carl Sandburg. They are first hand, and they are sympathetic, and they will move those who will allow themselves to be moved.

Moved not alone to indignation, though that is needed, but to thought. It is not possible, I think, to examine this record without concluding that the race problem as we know it is really a by-product of our planless, disordered, bedraggled, drifting democracy. Until we have learned to house everybody, employ everybody at decent wages In a self-respecting status, guarantee his civil liberties, and bring education and play to him, the bulk of our talk about "the race problem" will remain a sinister mythology. In a dirty civilization the relation between black men and white will be a dirty one. In a clean civilization the two races can conduct their business together cleanly, and not until then.

Certainly the idea must go that in order to segregate the races biologically it is necessary to degrade and terrorize one of them. For those who degrade and terrorize are inevitably themselves degraded and terror-stricken. It is only the parvenue, the snob, the coward who is forever proclaiming his superiority. And by