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 so, 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 being stated.  Obviously the planter could regularly pad his accounts, keep the Negro in debt, and be assured of his labor supply from year to year.