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Fight for Rights: The Chicago 1919 Riots and the Struggle for Black Justice Introduction This is a history of the fight for rights and citizenship undertaken by Black people in Chicago in that city’s first century. Covering the period from the 1830s to 1930s, this book looks at their successes and the forces that arose—in the streets, in city government, in the courts, and on the police force—to limit their extent. And it looks at how, and why, individuals and institutions attempted to justify those limits over time. Miscarriage of Justice Few legal records from the riot cases remain, but the one case we do have, a murder trial involving two Black teens, demonstrates how badly the legal system failed Black Chicagoans in the aftermath of the riots. In that case, those failures were not an accident. Government officials, judges, and jurors willfully ignored (and sometimes created) problems of law and facts in order to win convictions of the two teens.

Chief of Police John Garrity

John Garrity became police chief in 1918, after Chief Herman Schuettler died.

A lifelong Chicagoan, Garrity was born June 21, 1869 and grew up in a working class family. His father had been a teamster; his two sisters, Mary and Catherine Anne, went into millinery work as young women. John Garrity was ambitious. In the late 1880s, he began work for the post office as a letter carrier. In 1894, he was briefly hired as a police officer during the Pullman strike, as part of an effort to beef up the police to control labor, only to be fired in May 1895 after the city council cut the police budget. Undaunted, Garrity returned to the post office. By 1900, he was a superintendent, a position he held until his appointment as chief of Chicago's Police Department.

Many were surprised when he was made police chief, but anyone following the debates over police militarization would have understood the choice. In addition to his service with the post office, Garrity had a long career with the Illinois National Guard. He enlisted in the Second Infantry of the Illinois National Guard in 1889. By the time of the Spanish American War in 1898, he was a captain in the unit when it was sent to Cienfuegos, Cuba. In 1916, he was a commander when the troop when it went to the Mexican border during police actions against Pancho Villa. Garrity remained in command when his regiment was called up for service in World War I and went with his men to Camp Logan in Houston Texas in September 1917. Then, just before his men were sent overseas in April 1918, he abruptly resigned after being found physically unfit for overseas duty.

In March 1919, the New Majority complained that the “Chicago police are armed with army rifles and bayonets and the whole force has been drilled with these weapons.” When Garrity was questioned about the practice by the Chicago City Council, he admitted that no other city made its police officers learn how to use bayonets but declared that his men would continue to do so “until the peace treaty has been signed, and possibly for a longer time, until the period of reconstruction has passed.” Garrity also asked the city council for “a supply of gas bombs, similar to those used in trench warfare,” because he wanted his cops to be able to bomb houses when people were barricaded inside. And he advocated that the police department hire a supplemental police force, what he called a “depot brigade,” of 3,000 former soldiers and sailors to use in case of emergency.

In his letter appointing Garrity to head the department, Thompson made it clear that Garrity's extensive experience in the National Guard was the reason for his appointment. But Garrity did not just bring a general skill or enthusiasm for the weapons of war to Chicago. His military experience was of a very specific kind: Garrity had been involved in all of Illinois’ major race riots. In 1908, his national guard unit was assigned to patrol Springfield, Illinois, after the race riot in that city. In 1917, Garrity commanded 600 men on patrol in East St. Louis after the race riot there. The Illinois National Guard did not distinguish itself in its East St. Louis action. The Chicago Tribune blamed lack of ammunition, but an investigating committee reported that many of the guardsmen “stated that 'they didn't like n****rs' and would not disturb a white man for killing them.” The investigation by the House of Representatives concluded that members of the state militia shot at Black people who were trying to escape from white mobs.

Both Chicago’s Second Regiment and its commander managed to escape blame for the failures in East St. Louis. In an interview the day he took office, Garrity promised Chicago a new police department and assured the Chicago Tribune that he would be his own boss and not take orders from any politician. He also vowed that there would be no “soft jobs” and that all the officers would learn “military discipline.” That may have given hope to those who favored a turn toward a more militarized police; it did not quiet concerns about the department.

Garrity resigned as Chief of Police on November 10, 1920, and he died August 10, 1940.

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Monday Morning, July 28 It had not been obvious Monday morning that the violence of the night before would continue. As Blacks and whites headed off to work, Chicago’s mainstream white newspapers made little mention of Sunday’s violence. Chicago's Hearst paper, the Herald-Examiner, mentioned the rioting Sunday evening only briefly, devoting most of the coverage on their front pages to the death of Janet Wilkinson, a six-year-old white girl who had been killed by her white neighbor, Thomas Fitzgerald. The Herald-Examiner told its readers that a mob of over 200 of Wilkinson’s neighbors gathered outside the East Chicago Police Station, demanding that the police let them deal with Fitzgerald after he confessed.

On the front page of the Chicago Tribune, the account of the riot was squeezed into its left-hand column, buried beneath the main headline that told of Fitzgerald's confession. The virulently anti-labor paper also devoted space to the threatened streetcar strike and reported on a killing on the Kedzie Streetcar Sunday morning. In that incident, which the Tribune claimed grew out of the strike at the Crane Company, Wojciak Wodryo was killed while a second white man, William Gritsuk, was shot. Two Black men, Howard Morton and William Stubblefield, were beaten, and a police officer, John Leonard, suffered a broken arm.

Still, the violence at the lakefront the night before had alarmed the powers that be, and the city government responded by trying to separate Blacks from whites. Early Monday morning, city officials closed all the public parks and playgrounds in the Black Belt, and the Deputy Commission of Public Works, William Burkhardt, announced that as a further precaution he was laying off the 400 city workers in the city’s Second and Third Wards, which included the Black Belt. Burkhardt explained the bizarre decision, which meant that no garbage collection or road work would be done in either ward, was a necessary precaution because Blacks and whites worked together in the area. According to the Chicago Defender, shops and movie theaters in the Black Belt also closed.

In response to the violence of the day before, Oscar De Priest, who had served the Second Ward as the city’s first Black alderman, and Dr. George C. Hall, one of the city’s best known Black professionals, met with Chief of Police John J. Garrity to discuss how the police department planned to protect Chicago’s Black residents. Garrity quickly assured them the police could handle any further violence and promised that he would not hesitate to call in the state militia if the situation warranted it.
Sunday, August 3 Yet that Sunday, after touring the riot zone, Adj. General Dickson reported that things could not be better.

Later, after driving through the South Side, Garrity agreed, announcing that the “situation is calmer than at any time since the first outbreak a week ago.” Certainly, many of the guardsmen spent Sunday finding ways to relax. During the day, the Third Company entertained visitors at the Seventh Regiment Armory at Thirty-Third and Wentworth Avenue; that night, Ida B. Wells-Barnett's Negro Fellowship League held a dinner at their headquarters at 3027 S. State Street for seventy soldiers from the Company. Some members of the First Company spent the afternoon playing baseball; others devoted the day to drills, rather than patrolling.

Others were optimistic as well.

The Red Cross, which previously had provided aid only to veterans and their families, sent relief workers into the neighborhood back of the Yards to help the fire victims. United Charities, local churches, and several other organizations helped organize meals and shelter for the Packingtown families at Davis square. They were assisted by the meatpacking companies, which provided food.

Yet there were still problems getting assistance to people in the Black Belt. Chicago's two Black aldermen, R. R. Jackson and Louis Anderson, both asked the Herald-Examiner to remind readers that Black workers who had been kept from their jobs had problems feeding their families. The aldermen, working with several churches and organizations in the Black Belt, opened a temporary relief station at 3333 S. State Street and another at the Stanton Street Police Station.

And the police and assistant state’s attorneys reported progress as well, as they interrogated witnesses and suspects. At some point Sunday night, one of the people being questioned, Emma Jackson, confessed to an assistant state’s attorney that she had been one of four people who killed Harold Brignadello.

According to reports, she said that her “hand was on the trigger,” but that three other people with her, Clarence Jones, Edward Robinson, and Kate Elder, also shot at him from a window at 1021 S. State Street. Elder, who was also in custody, subsequently signed a confession agreeing with Jackson’s account. During an interrogation at the Englewood Police Station, another man, Sam P. Johnson, told an assistant state’s attorney that he had been shooting into a crowd of whites on Tuesday at a time when Berger Odman was killed. The coroner agreed to exhume Odman’s body, which was one of the first to be buried, to see if the bullet matched Johnson’s gun.

Yet for those watching carefully, that success offered more than enough reason for concern. All three of the people who confessed to assistant state’s attorneys Sunday evening were Black.
Containment Black people were police targets for other reasons. Although John Garrity had been forced out as police chief in 1920, Black arrests continued to reflect his view that Black migration to the city caused Chicago's rising crime rate.

In the Negro in Chicago, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations convened by Governor Lowden had tried to challenge that analysis, most dramatically by calling into question the data on which it rested. The report offered extensive evidence showing that the police arrested Black individuals far more often than they arrested whites for similar actions and also demonstrated that the police mistreated and abused Blacks far more often than whites.

The Commission’s report did adopt some of the arguments that Garrity and others marshaled against Black people. It called on the police and state’s attorney to “promptly rid the Negro residence areas of vice resorts, whose present exceptional prevalence in such areas is due to official laxity,” which reinforced a view that tied the Black community to vice and criminality more generally.

And it urged the city’s Black residents to promulgate “sound racial doctrines among the uneducated members of their group” and to discourage “propaganda and agitators seeking to inflame racial animosity and incite Negroes to violence,” suggestions that echoed those who equated Black efforts to defend their rights as citizens with disorder. To be sure, the Negro in Chicago also insisted that the white athletic clubs be brought under control, but since few attributed the failings of those clubs to whites as a group, the recommendations were not the same.

The other reason Black individuals were increasingly targeted by the police dated back to the late nineteenth century, and Josephine Curry’s case, where Josiah Baylies had argued that he had to segregate Blacks and whites inside his theater in order to prevent fights. During the race riots of 1919, more than a few white politicians expanded that argument to embrace the whole city, arguing that when Blacks went to neighborhoods or jobs where whites did not welcome them, violence inevitably broke out. Just as the scope of the argument expanded from 1888 to 1919, so too did the suggested remedy. It was no longer enough to keep Black people out of seats in theaters; the police needed to help keep Black individuals contained within their proper spaces.
Anti-Black Reaction If the purpose was to create anti-Black feeling among many whites in the neighborhoods near the stockyards, the fires back of the Yards did the trick. While the ashes were still cooling, William O'Toole, an alderman representing a majority-white ward southeast of the burned-out area, announced that "they will dare not let Negroes back in the yards again."

He added,
Whites of every nationality employed in the yards will combine against the colored man and he will need a company of soldiers near him to get anywhere near the stockyards.
The omnipresent state representative Thomas Doyle, whose district included Packingtown, agreed, as did the Chicago Evening Post, which reported that the police were sure that the fire had been set by Black individuals and described the arson as a “crafty” blow, noting that the victims of the fire were the
white workers whose race antagonism has kept 15,000 negroes out of the stockyards since Monday and was easily delivered for the reason that none of the troops guarding the race war zone have been posted west of Halsted.
The paper added that white workers vowed they would lynch any Black person who tried to return to the Yards. Taking the other side, the Chicago Daily News reminded its readers that for some time there had been a rumor on the South Side that white workers at the stockyards planned to strike unless all Black workers were removed from the packinghouses. Violence, the paper pointed out, followed on the heels of that rumor, as white rowdies from the neighborhoods around the Yards were organized into gangs to invade the Black Belt, destroy homes, and attack residents.

Concerned, officials from the city tried to challenge at least some of the rumors about the riot. City Health Commissioner Robertson sent a statement to the mainstream newspapers: “I want to put a stop once and for all to these wild yarns that are being carried from mouth to mouth in various neighborhoods,” Robertson explained. He emphasized the accuracy of the death lists that the city was maintaining, which were checked against the records of the coroner and at the morgue. He specifically denied reports that Thursday evening several Black groups had stormed a Swift plant at the stockyards and killed seven white men.

Other leaders, Black and white, raced to offer their own reactions to the violence of the previous week. Edward Wright dismissed claims that Black individuals had been radicalized by groups like the I.W.W. as ridiculous. Blacks, he argued, were like whites. They were law-abiding and wanted nothing more than that everyone to respect the rule of law. Alderman John Passmore denounced mob rule and denied reports that he said that all Black people should be disarmed. He also praised the work done by the Chicago Police, Garrity, and Alcock.

Those official efforts to calm white rage were undermined by what seemed to be a organized campaign. When William J. Burkhardt, Chicago’s deputy commissioner of public works, tried to address a crowd of people left homeless by the fire, two of the interpreters he hired used his speech to incite hostility toward the Black community. They harangued the crowd, telling them that Black individuals set the fires because they wanted the jobs white men did at the stockyards. Both interpreters were arrested, but it was too late. That evening, a mob of whites in Packingtown hanged a Black in effigy from a lamppost at a corner of Fifty-First Street. It took the combined efforts of Mary McDowell of the University Settlement House and the police to calm the mob, which finally dispersed when the police removed the effigy.
The Incident at the "Death Corner" The second example of “improved policing” in 1920 raised other questions about the way Chicago's police treated the city's Black residents. That incident occurred at Forty-Seventh and Halsted Streets, an area Governor Lowden's Commission described as “the heart of the district where some of the worst rioting took place in 1919.” For instance, it was at this intersection that one victim of the riots, Fedrico Gonzales, was assaulted. The Chicago Whip was blunter, calling the intersection the “death corner” that was “known as a place dangerous for any colored man or woman to pass day or night, notwithstanding the fact that a police station and a municipal courtroom is only a half a block distant.”

According to police officer Michael Hurley, who had starred in the Herald-Examiner’s accounts of the race riot the year before and, through luck happened to be Johnny-on-the-spot again in September 1920, the trouble began when a white streetcar driver named Thomas Barrett was killed at a corner newsstand by three Black men.

According to Hurley, Barrett started things by verbally abusing the Black men who had just gotten off work. Barrett then tried to physically attack one of them, Sam Hayes. At that point, Hayes pulled out a knife and cut Barrett’s throat. Hayes and the other two Black men involved quickly fled the scene, chased by a mob of angry whites yelling, “Lynch ‘em, kill ‘em, string ‘em up.”

With that, Hurley, who had done nothing to stop Barrett's abuse, ran with the white mob. He was soon joined by Sergeant John Carton of the detective bureau. Tellingly, even though there was a police station just down the block from the corner, Hayes and the others ran several blocks, to take refuge in St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church, at Forty-Fifth Street and Lowe Avenue.

A mob of several hundred whites quickly gathered around St. Gabriel’s, apparently provoked by a rumor that the three Black men had killed a white woman. When the white mob demanded that the priest at St. Gabriel’s, Father Thomas Burke, turn the men inside the church over to them, Burke refused.

It was Burke, not Hurley or Carton, who held off the mob until reinforcements were called in. Then, with Burke’s aid, a heavily armed group of officers were able to get the three men into a wagon, which carried them to the Hyde Park Police Station, at Fifty-First Street and Lake Park Avenue, several miles away.

Although a large crowd of whites remained outside the church after the Blacks had been taken away, Burke finally was able to persuade them to disperse peacefully. Just to be sure, the police, borrowing a tool from the 1919 riot, created a dead line on Wentworth Avenue. Their orders were to look for weapons, break up all groups of Black or white men, and “keep people moving on the streets,”

Once again, however, the police were ordered to focus on Black people. Garrity, still chief of police, ordered the men at the dead line to keep Black individuals from going west across it and directed the officers at the line to “search all automobiles and turn back those driven by colored men or containing colored people.”

Still, the police had learned something from the riot. This time, the department sent six hundred officers to the area around the stockyards, and in at least two instances, the officers patrolling that area rescued Black men from white mobs. In addition, Black individuals who worked near the stockyards were given police escorts to and from work that night and the next morning.

Even so, there were incidents of racist violence all night. Blacks and whites fought at Forty-Fifth and Wabash, not far from St. Gabriel’s. A white mob managed to get past the dead line and ran up and down State Street, throwing bricks through the windows of Black homes. White mobs also pulled down streetcar poles, stopped several cars, and attacked Black people inside them. A mob of Black individuals attacked and injured a white man, Frank Stevens, at Thirty-Fifth Street and Normal Avenue. Whites attacked several Black men, including Alonzo Jackson, who died of his injuries a week later. In addition, white mobs tried to burn down a home on Forty-Fifth Street. Skirmishes continued all night, and nine men were injured. And when Alfred Davenport, a Black man, was attacked by a white mob at Forty-Third Street and Union Avenue, he was arrested; the members of the mob that attacked him were not.

In a statement distributed to local papers the next day, Garrity claimed that prompt action by the police prevented a race riot.
Tuesday Night, July 29 At 9:00 p.m. Tuesday night, the Chicago Police Department concluded what had long been obvious: it could not stop the violence without help. Fortunately, help was at hand, more than four thousand members of the Illinois National Guard had been put on alert and were stationed in various armories around the South Side.

But when Police Chief Garrity contacted Adjutant General Dickson and asked him to order his men out onto the streets, Dickson told Garrity he could not send in the guard without permission from Governor Lowden. That was true; under state law, the governor did have to order the guard out. State's Attorney Hoyne had already asked Lowden to send in the troops, but Lowden had refused to do so until Mayor Thompson made the request. That was petty; nothing in the law required that approval.

That Tuesday night, Thompson dithered about whether he should call Lowden. While he did so, white mobs burned Black residences near Sixty-Third and Englewood Streets, and on Forty-Seventh Street, near Wentworth. Finally, at midnight, Mayor Thompson consulted with his staff and decided to defer to the judgment of the police on the question of whether the militia should be called into service. He called police headquarters, only to be told that Garrity had decided the police had the city under control. Thompson went home without asking the governor to call out the national guard.

Over the course of the day, eleven people had been killed or mortally wounded. At least 139 had been injured. Of the injured, once again, the majority (eighty) were Black.
Chicago Police 1919 In January 1919, the Chicago Association of Commerce, a collection of white business leaders in Chicago, formed the Chicago Crime Commission. Its purpose was to deter crime; as its inaugural report in February 1919 put it, the Commission would exist until “its aims have been accomplished and Chicago made a Newgate rather than a Mecca of the professional and habitual criminal." Part of the Commission's brief was to monitor the police department.

Chicago's City Council was also watching the police in the summer of 1919. That June, Alderman Walter Steffen, chair of the council’s police committee, conducted a secret inspection of police districts. He concluded that police officers were loafing on the job and refusing to investigate hangouts for known thieves, and he warned that the city council would not approve budget increases or raises if the police did not get to work. His committee immediately undertook an extended review of police work in the city. Although Steffen, in particular, was considered a political enemy of Thompson’s, he, too, favored a turn to a more militarized police.

The Black community in Chicago also was unhappy with the city's police. In March 1919, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Negro Fellowship League called a meeting to protest Garrity’s efforts to blame the city’s rising crime rate on Black individuals. On July 6, the department suspended three Black officers assigned to the Fiftieth Street Police Station after they refused to sleep in segregated quarters at the station. Complaining that the space they were assigned was unfit and unsanitary and that the segregated sleeping quarters were discriminatory, Patrolman William McCall led his two comrades, Charles G. Rowell and Walter L. Baston, into the white sleeping area and lay down on some beds. When they were told to leave, they first refused to vacate the beds and then, when ordered to do so, marched up and down the corridor outside the area protesting loudly. The three were suspended for insubordination and “threatening trouble.” An editorial in the Chicago Whip demanded that the commander of the station be fired for allowing segregation. When the case went before the civil service board some weeks later, more than seventy Black people filled the hearing room. At the hearing, the police department argued that it had to segregate the Black officers because of “a clash of sentiment between the white and colored officers.” The three were represented at the hearing by Louis B. Anderson, one of Chicago’s leading Black attorneys and a Chicago alderman. At the end of the hearing, the board reinstated the officers, but the three were later transferred to another station. Both incidents suggested that racism would be a problem during Garrity’s term in office.
National Guard, August 5 Meanwhile, there were signs that the police were interfering with the National Guard efforts to control anti-Black violence. A National Guard troop took ten members of Ragen’s Colts into custody and brought them to the Stockyards Police Station for processing, claiming the ten had challenged their authority and threatened to seize their weapons to use against Black individuals. Yet the police officers at the station immediately released all ten men on the grounds that there was no evidence that they were members of the Colts or had done anything wrong.

That afternoon, Lowden, Garrity, Alcock, Sheriff Peters, and Adjutant General Dickson met to discuss the work the police and militia were doing. All expressed hope things were quieting down. Peters announced that five hundred of his newly sworn special police were already on duty, and another five hundred were waiting on call. Dickson explained that he had stationed a company armed with machine guns at Fifty-First Street and Racine.

More worrisome, Dickson warned that the militia commanders had complained that some employers were harassing them to try to get their employees released from duty on the militia.
Laying Blame for the Riot That night, Beauregard Moseley, Julius Taylor, and several other Black businessmen gathered at the Idlewild Hotel. It was an unlikely group: Taylor, who edited the Broad Ax, was a Democrat in a city where most Black people were Republicans. Moseley was a lawyer, a Republican, and a sometime politician.

Despite their political differences, the men shared a vision that prompted them to blame Chicago’s poorer Black individuals, particularly the recent migrants from the South, for the violence. As they explained, there
was the consensus of opinion that the trouble largely grew out of false and misleading articles that appear in certain local Negro papers and the ill advice given by would-be leaders who have inculcated false ideas in the minds of many thoughtless colored people pertaining to their rights upon the termination of the war in Europe, regardless of education, property rights or citizenship.
They asked that the state militia be brought in to end the violence and called upon all Black people to pledge to assist the police.
That evening, Maclay Hoyne, the white state’s attorney, issued what would be the first of many statements about the riot and its causes. Hoyne declared that the
riots are no surprise to me, and I don’t believe to the police department either. The department has been so demoralized by politicians, Negro and white, that policemen are afraid to arrest violators of the law with political backing.
Offering a more extreme version of the argument offered by Taylor and Mosely, Hoyne explained that while “decent and intelligent” Black people suffered, Black gamblers, “a certain class of women,” and some Black youth had “been taught it (sic) needs neither fear nor respect the law and that politics and graft rule.”

Not everyone who issued a statement Monday night blamed Black individuals for the riot. A group of Black and white business and professional men met to demand quick action to stop the riots. The group, which included Dr. George C. Hall, T. Arnold Hill, president of the Chicago Urban League, and Judge Robert McMurdy, one of the partners in the firm that represented Josiah Baylies when he was sued by Josephine Curry thirty years before, who by this time was a leader in the Chicago branch of the NAACP, drafted a memo to the mayor and the police chief, urging the police take special precautions to protect people (i.e., Black individuals) living in the areas that were threatened by the violence.

They also demanded that there be “no discrimination between the racial elements in the matter of disarmament or police protection.” The law, they reminded Thompson and Garrity “should be equally and vigorously enforced.” They also called on Garrity to press charges against police officer Callahan, who had prevented the arrest of George Stauber at the beach Sunday evening.
Torture and the State's Attorney In Chicago, it was not just the police department that seemed to embrace torture.

In 1917, Cook County State's Attorney Maclay Hoyne joined Chicago Police Chief Herman Schuettler in asking Illinois Governor Lowden to veto legislation that attempted to declare the police torture illegal.

“The bill,” Hoyne argued, “is apparently directed at abuses which never have existed in the police department, at least in present years.” He added that passage of the bill would “prevent authorities from taking aggressive action against criminals.” Indeed, he added, if the bill became law “we might just as well close up shop.”

Governor Lowden did veto the bill, explaining that he did so on the advice of prosecuting attorneys, who felt that the bill would be a serious handicap to them as they tried to do their jobs. Two days later, Hoyne denounced several Cook County judges who, he said, were “so tender of the feelings of confessed criminals.”

The particular object of Hoyne's ire, Chief Judge Joseph Fitch, had refused to admit a confession into evidence. Fitch concluded that the defendant, Joseph Haller, who was on trial for attempted assault on a woman, had confessed involuntarily because he was questioned for over four hours about the case. Fitch said the length of time indicated that Haller had been tortured. After attacking that decision, Hoyne vowed to continue to get confessions aggressively.

He apparently did so. In November 1918, Chief Judge Kavanagh heard evidence in a claim by Albert Klein that he was given the third degree by Police Officer John Murphy and Edward Fleming, State's Attorney Hoyne's secretary. Klein, who was charged with theft and fraud, testified that he was arrested without a warrant and struck in the face by both Murphy and Fleming at the State's Attorney's office. Afterward, he said, he was taken to the Chicago Avenue Station and held incommunicado for twenty-four hours.

His co-defendant, Leo Stern, also claimed he was beaten until he confessed to the crime, implicating Klein. Both Fleming and Murphy denied hitting Klein, but three unnamed witnesses all agreed that when Klein was released from custody, he appeared to have been beaten. Judge Leo Doyle, from Chicago's Municipal Court, testified that he had heard of only one case involving a claim that a person was beaten by a police officer, and in that case, the man, named Milligan, did not want to press charges.

Judge Doyle also offered the novel legal theory that it was not a felony if a police officer beat a man in custody. “I have never,” Doyle said, “heard the charge made that if one man assaults another it is a felony. No such felony is defined in the statutes. The maximum fine on an assault charge is $100.” John Foyle, a lawyer appointed by Kavanagh to investigate Klein's claim, said at the end of the hearing that he would recommend that both Fleming and Murphy be charged. Edward Monger, chairman of the disciplinary committee for the Chicago Bar Association, also attended the hearing and said that the association was considering following up on the charges.

Although Hoyne denounced the claims as “bosh,” Judge Kavanagh brought the issue to the Cook County Grand Jury in late November 1918. In December, Edward Fleming testified before the grand jury and denied using the third degree to obtain confessions from either Klein or Stern. The grand jury apparently did not believe him. On December 6, it issued a report calling for the censure of the state's attorney's office and the Chicago police for using third degree methods. Hoyne responded quickly, charging that the lawyers for the Chicago Bar Association, who had brought the claims to the grand jury, had “appealed to racial, religious, and fraternal prejudices to obtain results.”

In spring 1919, Judge Henry Guerin added his name to the list of judges complaining that State's Attorney Hoyne was encouraging torture to get confessions. During a murder trial, Guerin threw out the confession of the defendant, Joseph Redeposits, because it had been obtained by threat of torture during an interrogation by John Owen at the state's attorney's office. When Guerin asked Chief Judge Kavanagh to order yet another grand jury investigation of the practice, Maclay Hoyne quickly issued a letter of rebuttal:
Every complaint of third degree methods in my six years in office has come from convicted criminals or lawyers or laymen indicted or with police records. Since the publicity given mushy utterances of a spiteful judge months ago, the third-degree defense has multiplied where no real defense exists. Confessions are obtained by knowledge of ordinary motives and rules that guide and govern human conduct and appeal to conscience and reason.
Hoyne went on to draw what he apparently felt was a crucial distinction:
All first offenders are treated sympathetically under the policy of my office. My police may have been rough with murderers, gunmen, highway robbers, drug crazed fiends, and may have not been sensitive about their "constitutional rights" when the public was endangered, but we have judges who worry over liberty of criminals more than life and safety of citizens, which is worse.
“Some judges,” he closed, “should be weaned or spanked.”

Two other judges in the Cook County courts, Robert Crowe and Albert Barnes, both former state's attorneys, quickly called their colleague's comments into question. They said that complaints of the third degree were rare, and Barnes added that when they were made they were suspect. “Some years ago, when I was in the state's attorney's office,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “I heard some complaints of that nature. They were usually regarded as a trick by the prisoner to obtain sympathy. I don't recall one instance of such a charge being substantiated.”

A criminal, Barnes explained, “seeking to escape punishment does not care what he swears to. His only object is to escape punishment.” Those comments by the two judges, both of whom were former prosecutors, were reinforced by Police Chief Garrity, who pointed out that, shortly after his appointment as chief of police, he had issued an order forbidding the use of brutal methods to obtain confessions. Garrity declared that to the best of his knowledge the police had not used torture since that order.

Judge Kavanagh remained skeptical and once again asked the grand jury to investigate. Hoyne loudly welcomed the investigation. A week later, the grand jury heard testimony from three men, Joseph Rachinski, Pete Cortlet, and Joseph Sampson. All three were saloon keepers or poolroom operators in Chicago; all three charged that they had been given the third degree by police officer Fred Koehler and representatives of the state's attorney's office.

While the grand jury's investigation into their claims was still going on, the state's attorney's office announced that, after an investigation, a gang of six men had confessed to one murder and over thirty robberies. In announcing the bust, Joseph Lowery, an assistant state's attorney, offered a message to the “judges and reformers who talk of the so-called third degree.” These men, he went on, confessed freely to their crimes without being subject to “brutal or unfair means.”

In early May, the grand jury issued the report of its investigation into the use of the third degree by the state's attorney's office in the case of Joseph Radakowitz. It found that there was no evidence the third degree had been used and praised Assistant State's Attorney John Owen for his work on the case.
Cleaning the Police House Exhibit B was the police department. After the riot, Garrity vowed to investigate and promised that if he found that any police officer “displayed prejudice during the riots” he would bring the officer before the trial board and seek to dismiss him from the force.

Predictably, that promise did not amount to much. In October 1919, four police officers, including Daniel Callahan, were brought before the civil service board on charges of misconduct during the riots. Callahan was charged with neglect of duty on the Twenty-Ninth Street Beach and with leading a mob of whites away from the beach on July 27, screaming “Let’s get the dirty n****rs.” All four were exonerated on every count and restored to active duty.

With the violence apparently over, political support for Thompson and Garrity’s plan to expand Chicago’s police force continued to weaken. In a series of editorials and articles, the Chicago Daily News complained that far too many officers on the department payroll were assigned to special duty, like delivering licenses, driving patrol wagons, or locking and unlocking cell doors, with the result that they were not doing patrol work. After pointing out that Chicago's police had recently won a pay raise (the paper did not mention that they had threatened to strike), it insisted that all Chicago’s police officers should all be required to do police duty. It concluded the “recent addition of 1,000 more policemen to the seriously mismanaged force constitutes a grievous wrong against the heavily burdened tax payers.”
Deputy Chief of Police, John Alcock After the Police Chief Herman F. Schuettler's death on August 22, 1918, Mayor Thompson named First Deputy Superintendent of Police John H. Alcock the Interim General Superintendent of Police until John J. Garrity was appointed on November 25, 1918. Alcock served as deputy to Garrity and coordinating the riot response with a particular attention to policing the Black Belt.
Labor's Response The unions and their supporters told a very different story. The Stockyards Labor Council (SLC) insisted it had been organizing Black workers all year and the evidence supported that claim.

In April 1919, the Butcher Workman ran an opinion piece by Mrs. G.W. Reed who identified herself as a Black woman and urged Black individuals in Chicago to join the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.
There will be no peace until the white man learns that the Black man must be considered, and we must learn that he will not consider us unless we fight.
Joining the union was the best way to fight, she added, because the Amalgamated Meat Cutter and Butcher Workman Union did not discriminate against Black people. “Therefore,” she concluded, “the Black man should take advantage of this great opportunity, so that he may be the instrument through which the discrimination and race hatred may be driven out of this country….”

The New Majority, a weekly published by the Labor Party in Chicago, reported that at least 30,000 stock yards workers and their families paraded on Sunday, June 8, 1919, in an effort to gain Black and white union members for the union’s push for a closed shop. When the SLC planned another integrated march for July 6, their permit to march was denied at the request of the packing companies who warned the police that the march posed a danger. As a result, Black and white workers had to march separately to Beutner Playground at LaSalle and Thirty-Third Streets, where they met to listen to the speakers. The event went well; Black and white workers stood shoulder to shoulder, in a “checkerboard,” and afterward the New Majority declared that, “If the colored packing house worker doesn’t come into the union, it isn’t the fault of the Stock Yards Labor Council.” At least one Black-owned paper seemed to agree. During the summer, the Chicago Whip had carried articles by union officials recounting their efforts to organize white and Black workers at the Yards.

There was other evidence the packing companies had been trying to interfere with union efforts to organize Black workers all summer. Before the riots, union organizers set up a system: every morning at 6:00 a.m., organizers met at the gate to the stockyards where casual workers gathered to get hired for the day and took any of the workers who were not members of a union to union headquarters to sign them up. Then the organizers took the workers back to the Yards in time to be hired. But there, the Labor Council claimed, union organizers and new union members were harassed by police and often arrested. Police also arrested organizers who made speeches from trucks urging people to join the union. One week, two union organizers at the Yards had been attacked by knife wielding Mexicans hired by the packers and “brought here to make trouble.”

On July 26, one day before Eugene Williams drowned, the New Majority reported that the packers were using a “Cossack patrol” to keep organizers from talking to workers. When that patrol, made up of Chicago Police Officers mounted on horses, broke up union organizing meetings, roughly 1,000 workers walked off the job to protest the police presence. The SLC complained to Judge Samuel Alschuler, the federal judge who had been appointed to oversee working conditions at the stockyards during the war and was still mediating claims between the workers and the packers. That time, Alschuler ordered the Chief Garrity to remove the police from the Yards, and with that, the walkout came to an end.
More Police Unfortunately, Thompson and Police Chief Garrity were far more interested in getting the city council to give them permission to hire an additional 2,000 permanent police officers. They faced a skeptical crowd. Alderman Richert, from the Fourth Ward, just north of the riot zone, objected that the city lacked the funds to make the hires. Alderman Steffen, from the Twenty-Third Ward north of the Loop, noted that there were hundreds of people who had been given police stars or appointed as special police as political favors. He introduced a resolution insisting that those men either turn in their stars or report for duty as riot police immediately. Faced with the city council’s delay, Garrity announced that he had hired an additional 1,800 special police officers who would go on duty the next day.

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