AT EIGHT-FIFTEEN on an already sultry Monday morning, the special train carrying Mayor William Hale Thompson and his associates lumbered into Chicago’s Union Station on the city’s West Side. Dozens of officials and reporters were already milling around the train shed as the clanging, huffing engine came to a stop at the end of the platform. The mayor himself—looking fatigued and disheveled from the long journey—was the first to alight from the train, and he was immediately besieged by reporters.

“What are you going to do about the South Side race riots?” one of them shouted out.

The mayor, incommunicado since the train had left Omaha late the previous afternoon, seemed surprised. “I haven’t heard about them yet,” he admitted.

Various reporters filled him in on the details.

“Sounds serious,” Thompson said, clearly unprepared to deal with this unpleasant news. In answer, he resorted to political boilerplate: “Conditions in that district must be carefully studied,” he said, “to get at the cause of the trouble.”

Another reporter asked, “What are you going to do about the Fitzgerald case?”

On this topic the mayor was better informed. In fact, while in Cheyenne he had sent a telegram to Deputy Chief Alcock directing him to make the case the police department’s top priority. “My heart bleeds for the sorrowing parents,” Big Bill intoned, “[but] I must let the law take its course. I understand the man has confessed and has been booked on a murder charge, so I don’t see [that there’s] anything I can do. I’ll find out today, though.”¹

Arguably the worst development to greet the mayor, however—at least from a political perspective—concerned the transit situation. Thompson learned to his chagrin that Governor Lowden had been demonstrating consummate brinksmanship in the time since negotiations broke down on Saturday, furiously arranging separate Sunday meetings with company and union representatives to force both sides back to the bargaining table. “The general situation, gentlemen,” Lowden had told the negotiators late on Sunday, “is far too serious for a car strike to take place. We have a generally disturbed industrial condition; other strikes are threatened, while the race riots on the South Side make it imperative that transportation be continued. It is a matter of public safety.”

The appeal seemed to work. Thanks to these tireless efforts by the governor—whose work, according to the Chicago Daily News, “cannot be too highly praised”—both sides had by late Sunday agreed to give ground on some of the crucial issues separating them. More meetings were scheduled for Monday, but it was believed that union representatives would have an acceptable compromise plan to present to their men at a mass meeting on Monday night. After days of on-again, off-again strike threats, all sides were now confident that at least this one crisis in the city would be averted. For the governor, such an outcome would be a distinct boon—the perfect public-relations coup with which to launch his nascent presidential bid. The fact that it all occurred while the mayor of Chicago was off roping steers and pretty ladies in Cheyenne could only make Lowden look that much better. In fact, the governor was so certain of success that he’d decided to leave town before the vote Monday evening to give a long-scheduled speech in Lincoln, Nebraska.²

Awash in all of this bad news, the mayor and his men left the station and proceeded to city hall, hoping to reestablish some semblance of authority over the city. Reports coming in from the South Side all morning were mixed. By noon, only scattered violence had been reported in the riot areas, but those familiar with the situation were not optimistic. Captain Michael Gallery, an experienced South Side police officer, informed the mayor and Chief Garrity that the local force—numbering fewer than 3,500 men—would simply be overwhelmed by the violence and that the state militia should immediately be brought in. “Unless the militia is called and the entire South Side put under martial law,” Gallery told them, “the race riots in Chicago will make those of East St. Louis [in 1917] look inconsequential by comparison.” State’s Attorney Hoyne, speaking to the press, was also calling for deployment of the militia, which by law would require Mayor Thompson to make a formal request for troops from the governor of Illinois.³

But Chief Garrity was not convinced. He warned the mayor that sending inexperienced militia troops into the fray could just add to the death and disorder (as it had in fact done in East St. Louis), and that the police didn’t need their help. Thompson proved receptive to this latter argument. With one eye as ever on the politics of the situation, he and Lundin were understandably reluctant to be perceived as needing outside assistance to control their city—especially if that help came from Governor Lowden.

The issue of the state militia, moreover, was a particularly sore topic between the mayor and the governor. Once before—back in September 1917—the two men had clashed over the deployment of militia troops in the city, and the confrontation had come very close to ending in outright violence. The episode had started with a decision by Thompson to permit a public meeting of a controversial pacifist group called the People’s Council for Democracy and Peace. Big Bill, who was at the time hoping to win support among Chicago’s antiwar elements, claimed that he had no legal right to bar a peaceful assembly of law-abiding American citizens; the governor strenuously disagreed. “Win the War Lowden,” as Thompson’s enemy was being called, ordered then police chief Herman Schuettler to close down the meeting, which had just convened at the West Side Auditorium. The chief obeyed, but that night an angry Thompson countermanded the governor’s order, instructing Schuettler not to interfere with the council’s plans. From there, matters had deteriorated. Refusing to back down, Lowden ordered the state militia to Chicago by special train to enforce his original order. A contingent of 250 militiamen arrived at Union Station at 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, September 2. In the meantime, Chief Schuettler had mobilized a thousand Chicago police officers “in case rioting should break out between the Mayor’s backers and the supporters of the government.”

Lowden himself arrived in Chicago on Monday morning. The People’s Council, he announced to a crowd of supporters, was “a treasonable conspiracy.” “Freedom of speech will be respected,” he opined, “but will not be permitted in Illinois to be used as a cloak for treason.”

Thompson was livid. The meeting would go forward, he announced, and it would be up to the courts to decide on the legality of the governor’s attempt to use militia troops to interfere in city affairs.

In the end, there was no great battle between police and militiamen on the streets of Chicago. The People’s Council quickly met again on Monday and officially adjourned before anything more could be done to stop them. Lowden and his militia—without a meeting to shut down—eventually went back to Springfield, leaving Thompson with a rebellious city council, an enraged press, and yet another court case to challenge his political survival skills. But the episode had only deepened the already severe animus between the two chief executives. And now, less than two years later, the thought of asking the governor to send this same militia into the streets of Chicago was hardly one that Thompson was eager to entertain.

So Big Bill decided to defy Captain Gallery’s advice and let the Chicago police continue handling the situation unaided. That afternoon, the mayor and his police chief announced that every officer in the city would be put on reserve for duty in the riot zone. Outlining a plan to physically surround and protect the Black Belt from any marauding mobs, Chief Garrity vowed that “every resource of the police force will be used to put an end to the violence—even if it becomes necessary to fill every jail in Chicago.”⁴

On the city’s North Side, meanwhile, the ire of a different kind of mob was focused on one man—Thomas Fitzgerald, now on a suicide watch in his cell at the Chicago Avenue station. Because of the menacing crowds, the coroner’s inquest was being conducted at the police station. With ill-wishers thronging Chicago Avenue from Clark to LaSalle (and overflow crowds running up and down Clark Street for half a block), police didn’t want to hazard transporting Fitzgerald to the County Building in the Loop, where inquests were normally held. Even so, it took an entire cordon of police to keep the mobs back and allow city and county officials to enter the station. And as the inquest progressed, the scene on the street was turning increasingly ugly. “Send him out here and we’ll hang him for you!” one man shouted, loud enough to be heard by the prisoner inside. Several officers were sent into the crowd to check for guns and other weapons. “You can never tell what will happen,” one department veteran warned. “The people seem pretty sore.”⁵

The session inside was fortunately brief. Deputy Chief Alcock, back to his subordinate role now that Chief Garrity had returned, laid before the jury the signed confession, which was read aloud by the deputy coroner while Fitzgerald listened, slumped in his chair. According to the Evening Post, the prisoner seemed overwrought and edgy. “The nonchalance with which he had gone through the arraignment earlier in the day was gone. He hung his head, and his hands and face twitched nervously.”

After the reading of the confession, Coroner Hoffman ordered the prisoner to stand. “Is this your signature?” he asked, pointing to the scrawl at the bottom of the document.

Fitzgerald mumbled a feeble yes.

Hoffman asked him to explain the autopsy results, which showed that Janet’s jaw had been fractured, breaking several teeth.

“I didn’t do anything to her teeth,” Fitzgerald insisted. “I don’t know anything about that.”

It was a detail that would never be adequately explained, though the damage probably occurred after death, when Fitzgerald was disposing of the body in the coal pile. The injury was, in any event, immaterial to the prosecution of the case. The jury retired and within minutes returned with its verdict—that Janet Wilkinson had come to her death “through acts of violence committed by Thomas Fitzgerald.”

The prisoner listened to the verdict in silence and then was led stumbling back to his cell.⁶

“We shall place Fitzgerald on trial as speedily as possible,” State’s Attorney Hoyne told reporters afterward. Though the Criminal Court justices were all currently on vacation, it was hoped that the trial could take place within thirty days. Judge Robert E. Crowe, chief justice of the court, said that as soon as the state and defense had prepared their case, he would make sure that a judge was available to hear it, even if he had to act as trial judge himself.⁷

As for a possible insanity plea, officials were quick to discourage any such attempt. “He certainly knew what he was about,” said prosecutor O’Brien, who had shown up at the proceedings wearing his red hanging tie. “He may be a degenerate, but he must pay for his crime.” Dr. W. A. Evans, the physician who had earlier identified the bones found in the Virginia Hotel sewer, concurred. “Fitzgerald may be a moron,” he wrote in an article for the Tribune, “but the fact that he is a pedophile or any other variety of sexual pervert or invert does not prove him feeble-minded. Some sexual perverts are feeble-minded but perhaps more are not.”⁸

The call by Deputy Chief Alcock for the incarceration of all potential pedophiles was now finding widespread support in the city. An article in Monday’s Tribune revealed that no fewer than twenty-five child molestations had been reported in Chicago since the beginning of the year, including two that had occurred just in the days since Janet’s disappearance. The number of unreported incidents could only be guessed at. One official put the number as high as two hundred cases per year in Chicago alone. “There is but one solution to the whole problem,” said Judge Harry Olson, the Republican jurist who had run against Thompson in the February primary. “We must have national legislation based on scientific lines.… The reason that Fitzgerald killed that little girl is that he had no feeling. He is clearly a victim of dementia praecox and has through injury or heredity been injured in his emotional centers. It meant nothing to him to squeeze the life out of that tiny body.” To Olson, the solution was simple—incarceration of all such men in farm colonies before they had a chance to commit crimes against children.⁹

That afternoon, the throngs around the Wilkinsons’ apartment house went suddenly quiet when a hearse turned onto the street and slowly pulled up at the curb. A way was cleared on the sidewalk as two men removed Janet’s casket from the back of the vehicle. While hundreds of grim-faced spectators looked on, the men carried the small white box up the stairs, through the crepe-hung doorway, and into the building for the wake.

The closed casket would remain in the Wilkinsons’ apartment overnight, standing in a corner of the parlor, surrounded by flowers, with tall candles set at each end. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, dozens of relatives and friends—including many of Janet’s schoolmates—would come to pray with the grieving family and say their good-byes to the dead girl. The funeral would be held at the nearby Holy Name Cathedral at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Some of the mourners—including many strangers standing in the street who had never even seen the girl when she was alive—would remain there all through the night.¹⁰

*   *   *

On the South Side, the serious violence began again in late afternoon, in the neighborhoods around the stockyards district. At around 3 p.m., gangs of white youths began patrolling the main thoroughfares just outside the yards and surrounding factories, waiting for the end-of-the-day shifts. The gangs knew that black workers would be easy prey here. In order to reach their homes due east in the Black Belt, departing workers would have to cross the intervening white neighborhoods. Whether they traveled by streetcar or on foot, they would be vulnerable.

The attacks started the moment workers left the safety of their workplaces. Crowds of white men descended on them, beating them with clubs, bricks, and hammers. Some blacks escaped the initial assaults and were chased for blocks. Oscar Dozier, a laborer at the Great Western Smelting and Refining Company, was spotted climbing over a fence to avoid going out the main entrance to the factory. Soon he was being pursued by a mob of several hundred screaming white men. They followed him west on Thirty-ninth Street, throwing stones as they ran. Just before reaching Wallace Avenue, Dozier fell. The mob was instantly upon him. When discovered by police several minutes later, Dozier was dead, with massive contusions and a two-inch knife wound in his chest.¹¹

Streetcars provided no safety whatever. Cars would be stopped by the mobs, who would yank the trolley assemblies from the overhead wires, immobilizing the cars and allowing rioters to attack their trapped black passengers at will. One crowd of 300 to 400 whites, including some children, stopped a Forty-seventh Street car in just this way after seeing several blacks inside. The white passengers got off, allowing several dozen rioters to climb aboard and start beating the five black men who remained. The five managed to get out of the car through the windows, but they were chased in all directions. One of them—John Mills—was hit in the back with a brick and knocked over. Before Mills could get up and continue running, a white youth overtook him and hit him in the head with a two-by-four, fracturing his skull. The other four black passengers were also brutally beaten, though none fatally.

Other similar incidents occurred on streetcars at Forty-seventh and Halsted, at Root Street and Wentworth Avenue, even as far away as Forty-sixth and Cottage Grove, east of the Black Belt. One car on the Thirty-ninth Street line was stopped when a stalled truck was discovered blocking the tracks. Several white men, who had apparently parked the truck there for this very purpose, forced their way into the car and began pummeling several black passengers with iron bars. Escaping from the car, the victims attempted to run east to Halsted, where several officers were stationed. Most managed to get away, but one, Henry Goodman, was tackled on the street and beaten so badly that he would die several days later.¹²

Just what the Chicago police were doing to prevent this mayhem is not entirely clear. With most of the force on duty in the Black Belt, police coverage in the white neighborhoods to the west was sparse. But even those officers who were present seemed remarkably ineffective. In some cases, their apparent passivity may have been intentional. The neighborhoods’ “athletic clubs,” widely regarded as the active instigators of most of the mob violence here on their own turf, were typically well connected with local politicians and enjoyed a kind of de facto police protection; much evidence exists that patrolmen from the Yards station “were all fixed and told to lay off on club members.” Whatever the explanation, gangs seemed able to operate with little danger of being arrested or even having their rampages curtailed by police interference. Significantly, one of the few arrests made as a result of these Monday streetcar raids was of a black man, Joseph Scott, who defended himself on an Ashland Boulevard streetcar by fatally stabbing his white attacker, Nicholas Kleinmark, with a pocketknife.¹³

But Kleinmark was hardly the only white casualty in Monday evening’s rioting. In the Black Belt, where violence broke out shortly after the disturbances in the stockyards district began, blacks were defending themselves—and, in some cases, attacking unprovoked—with a vehemence unheard of in any previous American race riot. In late afternoon, an armed mob of some three hundred to four hundred gathered at the intersection of Thirty-fifth and State Street, prepared to repulse a rumored invasion of the Black Belt by “an army of whites.” Any lone white man seen in the district was attacked mercilessly. Casmere Lazzeroni, a sixty-year-old Italian peddler, turned his banana wagon onto State Street at about 5 p.m. and found himself in the middle of an angry mob. As he tried to escape, four black youths chased him down the avenue, throwing stones until they managed to grab hold of the wagon, climb onto it, and stab the man to death with pocketknives. Shortly thereafter, Eugene Temple, the owner of a State Street laundry—a business that employed many blacks from the neighborhood—was jumped by three men while getting into an automobile with his wife and another young woman. His assailants robbed him and stabbed him to death before disappearing into the crowds, all while the two women watched in horror.¹⁴

As evening approached, carloads of armed whites began making forays into the Black Belt, speeding down the avenues and firing at random into crowds. In response, black gunmen took up positions on roofs, fire escapes, and upper-floor windows to shoot back. Sometimes the masses on the street were thick enough to stop the passing automobiles, so that their occupants could be pulled out of the vehicles and beaten or stabbed. Other cars were fired on by snipers—whether or not they had obvious hostile intent. Police were also targets. Journalist Edward Dean Sullivan, touring the area in a motorcycle sidecar for the Herald and Examiner, watched as a patrolman was shot right in front of him by a sniper. As the man fell to his knees on the sidewalk, Sullivan’s driver suddenly returned fire (the reporter didn’t even know he was armed) and then turned the motorcycle into an alley.

“Instantly [we] discovered it was the wrong alley,” Sullivan later wrote. “About twenty Negroes—waving, cursing, and obviously drunk—were to be seen about halfway down the alley-course before us. One, with his back toward us, fired a shot in the air. They discovered us even as my driver, swinging the car backwards, whirled out of the alley, turned abruptly, and started back up State Street.”

As they sped away from the trouble, Sullivan saw another sniper taking aim at them from a rooftop. Someone then hurled a shovel head at them, but the driver managed to veer around it as it clanged to the pavement in front of them. Finally, they reached a group of police at Twenty-fifth Street. Sullivan reported the downed patrolman, but officers claimed they already knew all about it. “Take my advice,” a police captain told him. “Get that machine out of here as fast as you can.”

Sullivan and his driver were more than willing to obey.¹⁵

The Thirty-fifth Street crowd had by 8 p.m. grown to number several thousand and now extended east to Wabash Avenue, where armed blacks were skirmishing with a contingent of sixty to one hundred policemen on foot and a dozen more on horseback. Rumors had been circulating for hours that a white man had shot a boy on the street from the fourth-story window of the Angelus, a mostly white apartment house on the corner. Police had searched the building and failed to produce either a weapon or a gunman, but the mob wasn’t satisfied and threatened to storm the building. The standoff grew increasingly antagonistic until, shortly after eight, a brick flew from somewhere in the crowd and hit a policeman. The badly outnumbered officers closed ranks and suddenly began shooting back with their revolvers. Chaos resulted as panicky rioters scrambled to get out of the intersection. The gunfire went on for almost ten minutes. Two men were shot and killed as they tried to escape into the entrance of the Angelus. More shots killed one man and wounded several others who tried to take shelter behind a trestle of the L tracks. Then gunfire erupted down the block at State Street. Rioters began shooting at a mounted policeman, who returned fire. Fleeing crowds left behind more wounded and a fourth man dead.¹⁶

Any semblance of law and order in the Black Belt had by now evaporated. Police headquarters at the Stanton Avenue station was flooded with riot calls from all points in the district and beyond. Ever-larger white gangs were reported to be marching into the contested border neighborhoods and beating any blacks they could find. Often police would rush to the scene of an incident only to find abandoned victims bleeding, unconscious, and/or dying in the streets.¹⁷

Back at city hall, Mayor Thompson was facing pressure from all sides to take extraordinary measures to control the mayhem. Several aldermen from the city council urged him to suspend search-and-seizure laws in the Black Belt so that police could confiscate rumored weapons caches. Thompson, always conscious of his black support base, refused. He did order the mandatory closing of all South Side pool halls, saloons (now serving only near beer, at least in theory), and other gathering places. But for most of the day on Monday, he and his administration tried to downplay the situation on the South Side. Comptroller George Harding, after touring the riot districts, insisted that accounts of rampant bloodshed had been exaggerated, and that no special action was required. “I think that if the police department does its duty, the outbreaks will not be serious.”¹⁸

As more and more reports of the evening’s escalating violence reached city hall, however, Thompson realized that police might soon be overwhelmed. Acceding only partially to calls from the newspapers and civic leaders to send in the militia, he reluctantly telegraphed Lieutenant Governor John G. Oglesby in Springfield, requesting that the troops be mobilized but only held “in readiness in one of our armories, to make them quickly available for the enforcement of the law when the necessity demands it.” Over the next few hours, 3,500 troops—from the Illinois National Guard and the Illinois Reserve Militia—were sent to the city. Even as the violence raged, however, the mayor refused to deploy them on the streets. Instead, they were forced to merely stand by, waiting for an order to act.¹⁹

Some of the militia troops had been eagerly awaiting the call since the beginning of the violence and were frustrated by the mayor’s decision. Sterling Morton, thirty-three-year-old scion of the Morton Salt family, was an officer with the First Regiment of the Illinois Reserve Militia. Refused on physical grounds for overseas service during the war, he had instead joined a militia training unit, part of a volunteer domestic security force set up by Governor Lowden after regular National Guard regiments were sent to fight abroad. Keen to do his part, Morton had trained hard, drilling with other volunteers (in donated uniforms and using rifles with no ammunition) at the Municipal Pier through the frigid winter of 1917–18. After the Armistice was signed in November 1918, many of the other troops quit, but Morton, realizing that the need for a reserve militia “was even greater now that the controls and restraints imposed by the war were lifted,” stayed on. Eventually, his diminished unit was combined with several others to become M Company of the First Regiment. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of the riot, they had been sent to nearby Camp Logan for a week of intensive training, and now the men were more than prepared to restore order on the streets.²⁰

For Morton, a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, the spectacle of a Chicago at war with itself must have been particularly painful. Grandson of J. Sterling Morton (Grover Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture and the creator of Arbor Day) and son of Joy Morton (founder of the famous Chicago salt company), he had been born and raised in the city and had quickly become a young lion in its commercial and political elite. In 1910 he had married Sophia Preston Owsley—the granddaughter of Thompson’s Democratic predecessor as mayor, Carter H. Harrison—and began working for the family business. Four years later, when the company decided it needed a new logo, it was Sterling Morton who chose the now-ubiquitous drawing of the girl with an umbrella spilling salt (“When It Rains, It Pours”), because the girl made him think of his three-year-old daughter, Suzette. Since then, he had left Morton Salt to become president of the Morkrum Company, a firm that made automatic printing telegraph machines. But while he might have been a chief executive in the office, in the Illinois Reserve Militia he was still a lowly adjutant, and so he had to wait for orders from his superiors just like any other militiaman.²¹

The waiting on Monday had been maddening. Morton had seen the crowds around the Twenty-ninth Street beach on Sunday evening, when he was returning by train from a company picnic south of the city, but he hadn’t known what it was all about until he saw the next morning’s papers. Shocked by what he read, he left the office immediately and reported to Colonel Lorenzen, his superior officer, for duty. By four-thirty in the afternoon, however, no call for the militia had come, so the colonel sent Morton and the rest of the men home. That was just two hours before Mayor Thompson sent out his request for the troops to be held “in readiness.” Contacted at home, Morton quickly bolted some dinner and drove back downtown to the mobilization point at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street in the Loop.

The scene there was hopelessly disorganized. Some of the militiamen had mistakenly been told to gather at the Old Eighth Regiment Armory, and so were heading unarmed and in small groups straight into the riot zone—a sure recipe for disaster. Even those troops who gathered at the correct place in the Loop, while equipped with rifles and bayonets, had no ammunition. Frustrated, Colonel Lorenzen instructed Morton to commandeer a Yellow Cab and retrieve some cases of ammunition that were being stored at a South Side office building. Then he was to proceed farther south to the L station at Fortieth Street and Indiana Avenue to deliver some of the ammunition to Major Macey, who was in charge of another force of men down there. On the way, Morton was to pick up or redirect any straying militiamen he encountered heading for the Old Eighth Armory.²²

Finding a cab was a task in itself. Morton tried to get one outside the Chicago Club, but the taxi starter there told him that no cabs were being sent south of Twelfth Street because of the rioting. Finally, one driver came up to him. “Get in my cab,” he said. “It’s just around the corner and I will take you anywhere you want to go.”

They headed into the riot zone. Morton was armed with just a .45 (the driver also had a small pistol), and when he saw what was going on in the streets, he felt outgunned. “I saw sights that I never shall forget,” he later wrote to his cousin. Gunfights raged between rioters and police, and once, after seeing a man firing from a narrow passageway between two buildings, Morton shot back at him, though this was arguably against orders. On Thirty-fifth Street, they picked up a wandering militia private who at least had a rifle; Morton issued him some cartridges and felt a little safer.

Even after they got to the L station and delivered the ammunition, however, they were not out of danger. As Morton spoke with Majors Macey and Parker at the street-level entrance to the station, a car came careening around the corner and several shots were fired from inside. No one was hit, but Macey and Parker wisely decided that they should perhaps continue their discussion on the station platform at track level, well above the street.

It was to be all the action Morton saw that night. Though he and the other militiamen waited eagerly for the command to engage with the rioters, none ever came. Finally, he was ordered to collect the roughly one hundred men who had gathered at the L station, issue them ammunition, and then march them in columns to the Seventh Regiment Armory near the White Sox ballpark. It was a journey of about a mile, and it went off without incident, the men marching with fixed bayonets as the faithful Yellow Cab accompanied them (the driver’s meter running all the time). At the armory, there was no commissary or sleeping facilities, so the men were forced to simply bed down on the drill floor and hope that the order sending them into action would come tomorrow.²³

It was a wrenching situation, for the violence in and around the Black Belt only got worse as the evening progressed. “The South Side is a seething cauldron of hate,” the Evening Post reported in its late edition. And the police, if anything, seemed to be making matters worse. Long-standing hostility between blacks and the largely Irish-American police force was manifesting itself in grisly confrontations throughout the riot districts. Horace Jennings, a black man lying wounded on a street after an encounter with a white mob, was approached by a patrolman who he thought was going to help him. “Where’s your gun, you black son of a bitch?” the officer allegedly snarled. “You damn niggers are raising hell.” The officer then hit Jennings over the head with a nightstick, knocking him unconscious.²⁴

This was not an isolated event. According to many witnesses, police were often “grossly unfair” in their conduct toward the rioters, frequently arresting black victims while letting their white assailants go free. Some police stood by idly even as blacks were beaten by mobs a few yards away. Nor was this kind of blatant bias entirely one-sided. In the warlike atmosphere that had developed on the South Side, many blacks regarded any white person in uniform, regardless of his actions, as an enemy and therefore a legitimate target for their bricks, stones, and bullets.²⁵

As in any war situation, there was no such thing as an innocent bystander. In her diary, Emily Frankenstein wrote anxiously of her father’s near escape when, returning from a house call at the Vincennes Hotel on Monday evening, he found himself in the midst of the clashing mobs on Thirty-fifth Street. One man was shot in the stomach by a stray bullet while sitting at the dinner table in his Wentworth Avenue apartment. In one street brawl, a passing reporter for the Defender, Lucius C. Harper, had to dive to the ground and play dead while police bullets whizzed past his head and shattered glass fell all around him. A man behind him was shot in the neck and fell over the reporter’s prone body. “Blood from the fatal wound trickled down the pavement until it reached me,” Harper wrote, “but I dreaded making a move.”²⁶

The anarchy on the South Side continued well past midnight and into the early-morning hours. By 3 a.m., the day’s death toll had reached 17, with an additional 172 wounded—far higher than the totals for the first day of the riot. But the worst chaos was yet to come. Contrary to all expectations, the late-night meeting of the transit workers, which had been held despite the widespread violence, had ended disastrously. Defying their leaders, union members had rejected the compromise wage plan that Governor Lowden had worked so hard to broker. Instead, the membership voted to declare an immediate system-wide strike. So at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, every streetcar and elevated train in Chicago ground to a stop, leaving the city paralyzed at its most vulnerable moment.²⁷