o, and as the
dead body of the Negro boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown
on both sides. The trouble thus engendered spread through the Negro
district on the South Side, and for a week it was impossible or
dangerous for people to go to work. Some employed at the stockyards
could not get to their work for some days further. At the end of three
days twenty Negroes were reported as dead, fourteen white men were dead,
scores of people were injured, and a number of houses of Negroes burned.

In the face of this disaster the great soul of Chicago rose above its
materialism. There were many conferences between representative people;
out of all the effort grew the determination to work for a nobler city;
and the sincerity was such as to give one hope not only for Chicago but
also for a new and better America.

The riots in Washington and Chicago were followed within a few weeks by
outbreaks in Knoxville and Omaha. In the latter place the fundamental
cause of the trouble was social and political corruption, and because he
strongly opposed the lynching of William Brown, the Negro, the mayor of
the city, Edward P. Smith, very nearly lost his life. As it was, the
county court house was burned, one man more was killed, and perhaps
as many as forty injured. More important even than this, however--and
indeed one of the two or three most far-reaching instances of racial
trouble in the history of the Negro in America--was the reign of terror
in and near Elaine, Phillips County, Arkansas, in the first week of
October, 1919. The causes of this were fundamental and reached the very
heart of the race problem and of the daily life of tens of thousands of
Negroes.

Many Negro tenants in eastern Arkansas, as in other states, were still
living under a share system by which the owner furnished the land
and the Negro the labor, and by which at the end of the year the two
supposedly got equal parts of the crop. Meanwhile throughout the
year the tenant would get his food, clothing, and other supplies at
exorbitant prices from a "commissary" operated by the planter or his
agent; and in actual practice the landowner and the tenant did not go
together to a city to dispose of the crop when it was gathered, as was
sometimes done elsewhere, but the landowner alone sold the crop and
settled with the tenant whenever and however he pleased; nor at the time
of settlement was any itemized statement of supplies given, only the
total amount owed bei