Worse Than the Cicero Riots

SEQUELS Worse Than The Cicero Riots Edmund Burke said that he did not know how to indict a whole people; but last week the Cook County, ILL. grand jury found a way of misusing the power of indictment to disgrace a whole metropolis.

The grand jury investigated the riots at Cicero, an all-white town, where Harvey E. Clark, a Negro, was prevented from moving into an apartment that he had rented (TIME, July 23). Not one of the 126 persons arrested for rioting was indicted. Instead, the grand jury indicted George C. Adams, a Negro, who is part owner of the building where Clark leased a home; Charles Edwards, a Negro rental agent who handled the deal, and George N. Leighton, a respected Negro lawyer who acted as attorney for Clark and for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after the riots started.

It also indicted Mrs. Camille DeRose, a white woman with a record of arrests, who was a former owner of the building and seems to have no direct connection with the case; Norman Silverman, a furrier, for handing out Communist pamphlets after the riots, and Erwin Konovsky, Cicero's police chief.

Chicago, which is considerably more tolerant than its satellite town of Cicero, is hopping mad over the indictments, especially at the charge against Lawyer Leighton. The three Negroes, Leighton, Edwards and Adams, are accused of "conspiracy to damage property." The grand jury seems to think that it is wrong to rent an apartment in Cicero to a Negro, wrong to defend his rights, but O.K. to burn his furniture and chase him out of town.