of the Negroes in the District of Columbia.  For three days the violence continued intermittently, and as the constituted police authority did practically nothing for the defense of the Negro citizens, the loss of life might have been infinitely greater than it was if the colored men of the city had not assumed their own defense.  As it was they saved the capital and earned the gratitude of the race and the nation.  It appeared that Negroes—­educated, law-abiding Negroes—­would not now run when their lives and their homes were at stake, and before such determination the mob retreated ingloriously.

Just a week afterwards—­before the country had really caught its breath after the events in Washington—­there burst into flame in Chicago a race war of the greatest bitterness and fierceness.  For a number of years the Western metropolis had been known as that city offering to the Negro the best industrial and political opportunity in the country.  When the migration caused by the war was at its height, 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.