ight, tens of thousands of
Negroes from the South passed through the city going elsewhere, but
thousands also remained to work in the stockyards or other places. With
all of the coming and going, the Negroes in the city must at any time in
1918 or 1919 have numbered not less than 150,000; and banks, cooeperative
societies, and race newspapers flourished. There were also abundant
social problems awakened by the saloons and gambling dens, and by the
seamy side of politics. Those who had been longest in the city, however,
rallied to the needs of the newcomers, and in their homes, their
churches, and their places of work endeavored to get them adjusted in
their environment. The housing situation, in spite of all such effort,
became more and more acute, and when some Negroes were forced beyond the
bounds of the old "black belt" there were attempts to dynamite their new
residences. Meanwhile hundreds of young men who had gone to France or to
cantonments--1850 from the district of one draft board at State and 35th
Streets--returned to find again a place in the life of Chicago; and
daily from Washington or from the South came the great waves of social
unrest. Said Arnold Hill, secretary of the Chicago branch of the
National Urban League: "Every time a lynching takes place in a community
down South you can depend on it that colored people from that community
will arrive in Chicago inside of two weeks; we have seen it happen so
often that whenever we read newspaper dispatches of a public hanging
or burning in a Texas or a Mississippi town, we get ready to extend
greetings to the people from the immediate vicinity of the lynching."
Before the armistice was signed the League was each month finding work
for 1700 or 1800 men and women; in the following April the number fell
to 500, but with the coming of summer it rapidly rose again. Unskilled
work was plentiful, and jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building
and construction work, and in light factories and packing-houses kept up
a steady demand for laborers. Meanwhile trouble was brewing, and on the
streets there were occasional encounters.

Such was the situation when on a Sunday at the end of July a Negro boy
at a bathing beach near Twenty-sixth Street swam across an imaginary
segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him, knocked him off a raft,
and he was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked him
to arrest the boys who threw the stones. He refused to do s