Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/71

Rh is square. The worklngman who falls for a capper and thinks he is going to try his wrist, he don't try his wrist at all. He goes up against dice that are fixed and cards that are marked and they take his money away from him."

Now for the contrast. Take a look at the buildings where live some of the victims of the gamblers, who are naturally also the victims of the police who let the gamblers run the kind of games that are run.

A house to house canvass was made by a colored newspaper man of two blocks of residences or tenements in Dearborn street adjacent to the South State street craps and poker games. The figures jotted down in the notebook of this investigator have a special significance when it is recalled that it is from these tenements that the gambling houses get part of their customers.

Within two blocks were found a total of eighty-three families where 96 per cent of the boys were truants from the public schools, and 72 per cent of these boys were retarded at least one year by reason of truancy. In most cases the parents were away from home so much that they were out of touch with the children. At sixtytwo homes the condition of furniture, walls and ceilings was classified as "dilapidated." In five instances there was water dripping into a living room from a toilet room in bad order on a floor above.

In thirty-one cases the father had "deserted," which means he is tired, dead, sick or gone wrong from unknown causes. In nineteen cases the father of the family was dead, and the mother was struggling with a variously sized brood of young ones. In twenty-eight cases the father was a heavy drinker. Three of the fathers were in jail and eleven homes were motherless. Forty mothers