St. Paul Recorder

The Cicero Fiasco

Grand juries can make mistakes. One grand jury which made a mistake of international as well as of grandly undemocratic proportions was that of Cook county, Illinois. This was the jury investigating the race riots in Cicero, where more than three thousand persons participated in mob disorder in an effort to prevent a Negro family from moving into a home in the neighborhood.

The task of the grand jury was, certainly, to indict those responsible for stirring the emotions of the mob. Instead, the five persons indicted included the former owner of the apartment building where the home had been rented to the Negro family; a Negro attorney who purchased the building from the first owner; the Negro renting agent who had rented the apartment; the attorney for the family which was target of the riots; a man who was said to have handed out leaflets of Communist origin three weeks after the riots occurred: and the Cicero police chief.

All except the police chief were indicted on conspiracy charges. The two attorneys, the renting agent and the former owner of the building were charged with "inciting to riot" and conspiracy to injure property by causing a depreciation in the real estate market price of the building by renting to Negroes: the leaflet-distributor was charged with conspiracy to cause a riot by handing out leaflets. The police chief was charged with misconduct in office. Not one of the some one hundred and fifty rioters arrested during the three-day period of violence was named by the grand jury.

The Attorney General of the United States, at the request of such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the CIO, has ordered a federal grand jury investigation. It is impossible to know yet whether or not the inquiry will be broad and deep enough to repair the damage done to justice by the Cook county jury. But for the sake of democracy in the U. S. and for the sake of our reputation abroad, it had better be.

Otherwise, the results can be foretold without too much risk of error. Anti-discrimination and anti-segregation laws will become meaningless; violence will be encouraged; those whose way it is to appeal to prejudice, bigotry and hate, and who do not hesitate to suggest mob action as a tactic in their campaign to overthrow democracy, will be emboldened.

At the same time the repercussions abroad can hardly be softened except by the most vigorous and drastic type of investigation by the federal grand jury. When the riots occurred, Governor Dewey was touring the Far East. He could not understand, it was reported, why photographs of the rioting were on the front page of the newspapers of India. Possibly he could not understand this. But the very fact they were on the front pages is enough to tell us of the manner in which our habits of discrimination are viewed by other peoples. If the riots seemed obnoxious to them, what are they even now thinking of the findings of the Cook county jury?— York (Pa.) Daily Gazette