A Few Red Drops: Chapter 17–Epilogue

Around nine o’clock, darkness set in with its inherent cloak of anonymity for the lawless.

Out in the streets, the rush of unleashed anger was palpable.

A morning train brought Mayor Thompson back into the city from a political junket in Wyoming.

A police captain who knew well the animosity between the Black Belt and Packingtown communities was deeply concerned.

To tamp down on the violence, they would need assistance from the state militia.

A little way down the road, a crowd of whites was assembled—men, women, children even—waiting in the heavy humid heat of the day, swiping hands across red faces to stanch the flow of sweat, white-knuckled fists clenched around the handles of switchblades and baseball bats.

A few young men, the leaders, showed off their physical prowess, detaching the cars from their wires.

They could hear the hum of a disgruntled crowd rising from the street below.

Under cover of darkness, the gangs ratcheted up the action.

Abandoning the movie idea, they joined the mob in a night of roving violence.

Marauding through railroad stations, bursting into hotels and restaurants, they smashed windows and tables, snatched up property that happened to catch their attention, looked for blacks to attack.

Blacks protected by police and militia bought provisions during the riot.

A speeding car careened out of control, smashing into a police wagon.

Voices clamored for activation of the militia.

White workers in the Stock Yard still seethed with resentment and hatred toward the blacks they blamed for undermining the union.

She also condemned the discriminatory approach her committee observed being taken by police with respect to confiscation of arms: “Homes of white people are not searched but the constitutional right of citizens to bear arms is violated without compunction in the case of colored people.”

Men surveying the burned-out Lithuanian community while the fire still smoldered.

Union leaders welcomed the reprieve.

A popular Polish Catholic priest urged calm, calling the riots a “black pogrom” and hinting that the Irish were the culprits, trying to draw the Lithuanians into the battle.

The union newspaper, the New Majority, pleaded for solidarity across racial lines: “Right now it is going to be decided whether the colored workers are to continue to come into the labor movement or whether they are going to feel that they have been abandoned by it and lose confidence in it.”

Homes in the Lithuanian Neighborhood destroyed by arson.

A white minister stated at a union meeting, “This riot has come to us as a shock after all our idealism."

After the riot, Chicago had a choice. It could wash its hands of responsibility, placing blame on the poor. Or it could own up to its complicity.

Some individuals took the narrow view, insisting that the culpability and the solution lay with the mobs.

Responding to a call by T. Arnold Hill and other leaders of both races, a twelve-member commission—six blacks, six whites—was appointed to study the factors that led to the riot and to make recommendations for how to move the city forward.

He showed no remorse, telling the commission, “If a Negro should say one word back to me or should say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of young men of the district, mostly ex-service men, who would procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble should come from the incident.”

But justice did not roll for blacks as it did for whites: two-thirds of the riot victims were black, but only one-third of those indicted were white.

As the commission observed, this “suggests the conclusion that whites were not apprehended as readily as Negroes.”

If Robert Horton had been alive in 2008, he surely would have preserved for posterity his November 5 copy of the Chicago Defender, announcing Barack Obama’s election as the first black president of the United States.

As of this writing, today’s disparity between rich and poor is as wide as the divide between Swift and his laborers one hundred years ago.

Millions of black men, women, and children are beginning and ending their days in rundown, paint-peeling, pipes-leaking homes reminiscent of the old communities of Packingtown and the Black Belt.

As President Obama has reminded us, if we look closely we will see the "quiet riots” on “any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton...born from the same place as the fires and the destruction...[that] happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates.”

Ida Wells-Barnett understood that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Carl Sandburg, who witnessed and wrote about Chicago’s 1919 riot, penned a poem about the cycle of convulsion and complacency: “Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.”

Carl Sandburg, who witnessed and wrote about Chicago’s 1919 riot, penned a poem about the cycle of convulsion and complacency: “Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.”