The Races: Battle of Roosevelt Road

THE RACES

Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement's most eloquent apostle of nonviolence, and Floyd McKissick, an impassioned advocate of "Black power," linked arms last week at a Chicago rally to preach comity within the Negro movement. Both leaders agreed that the Negro could best achieve his social and economic goals by peaceable means. "Our power," declared King, "does not reside in Molotov cocktails, rifles, knives and bricks." And yet, as in Harlem in 1964 and in Watts last year, the hatred and frustration of the Negro slum dweller erupted in an insensate wave of violence that filled Chicago's near West Side streets with the wordless roar of the mob and the cries of victims wounded by the very weapons that King had deprecated.

"Why?" The riots exploded in a dreary slum around Roosevelt Road, southwest of The Loop, where residents—as in other neighborhoods—opened fire hydrants in a vain attempt to mitigate a day of 95° heat and 70% humidity. The police, as usual, came around to close the hydrants—only to be defied at one point by a young Negro man, who set the flow going again.

The cops tried to grab him. He called to friends for help. The mob was born. Within the hour, roving bands, composed largely of youngsters, were looting stores, setting fires, and heaving bricks and bottles at the blue-helmeted police who were sent in to restore order.

Next day the riots had subsided —partly because police allowed the hydrants to gush until 5 p.m. before closing them. Then a Negro girl doused a cop with a pail of water, and the slum ignited once more. That night and the next, the level of violence increased by almost geometric progression, spread ing west and south to cover an area eight miles square. Negroes stopped automobiles driven by whites and beat the occupants. Small gangs pillaged scores of shops. They hurled fire bombs, rocks and chunks of masonry at the firemen who responded to the alarms. As Molotov cocktails burst in one drugstore window, a Negro woman emerged, weep ing. "Why would they do this to their own people?" she asked. "The world's gone mad."

Nights of the Gun. From rock and bomb the rioters turned to guns. Snipers shot at police and firemen, wounding half a dozen. At the intersection of Lake and Wood Streets, 100 policemen armed with rifles traded shots with a dozen assailants in and around an apart ment project for an hour. Like guerrillas, most of the gunmen disappeared into the night after being surrounded.

Surprisingly, there were only two gunshot deaths: a 14-year-old Negro girl, who had been watching the rioting, and a 28-year-old Negro man, found in an alley; at least 83 other civilians were wounded and 403 arrested by week's end.