The Augusta Courier

18-Month Race War Goes Merrily On In City Of Chicago

Violent Assaults Bounce Here, There Among White, Negro School Children

There has been a race war going on in the City of Chicago for eighteen months.

The scene of the conflict has been the Trumbull Park housing project.

This housing project contains four hundred and twenty-six families.

The war was caused by city officials moving ten or twelve Negro families into the housing project.

Longest Race Fight

The South Deering Bulletin, published in Chicago, says this was "the nation's longest race fight."

At one time it took eleven hundred policemen to guard this project in an effort to keep order. Even with eleven hundred policemen guarding the project, bitterness, hatred and violence erupted.

The number of policemen has been reduced to less than three hundred now to guard this area covering a few blocks.

Scars of Bitterness

As a result of this racial warfare, bitterness and hatred persist among the races.

In this connection, the South Deering Bulletin, on May 24, 1956, said:

"Gone is most of the violence and most of the policemen, but the scars of bitter racial strife still remain, and once in a while they are irritated by overt actions of hate."

In recent months, assaults and violence have taken place between the white and Negro school children.

Negro Newspaper

Recently, the Chicago Defender, a Negro newspaper, got the officials of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations to help them investigate the attacks on Negro children in the Trumbull Park area.

The Chicago Defender said that they were unable to determine "the thorny question of how many assaults are the result of prompting by racist parents and how many are normal manifestations of youthful meanness."

The Chicago Defender charged that the Negro children in the area, when they entered the Bright School in that area, were made to bow to the white children.

They charge:

"There are still minor incidents almost every day."

But the hatred and bitterness exists and the white people are contesting to the last the right of Negroes to enter an all-white area and to force the mixing of the races.

Off Limits Streets

The Chicago Defender, the Negro newspaper, in the same article said of the Trumbull Park area:

"But the tension was there and it came out in conversations with the tenants."

Some streets have been declared off limits to the Negroes by the whites and it hasn't been safe for any Negro to even walk along these streets.

Chicago's example with Trumbull Park is one of the finest examples to prove the value of the system of segregation.

20 Years of Hatred

After the slaves were freed the people of the South went through twenty years of hatred and bitterness between the races. Violence erupted throughout the Southland and there was a continual flow of blood.

Our forefathers in the South tried every method possible to work out a solution and to find some way that the two races could live together in peace, in a spirit of friendship and goodwill without violence and bloodshed.

As a result of this twenty-year ordeal, there finally emerged the pattern of segregation and it has proved to be the only plan under which the Negro and white races can live together in a state of peace and harmony.

This is still true in the South and it is being found to be true in Chicago.

True In Chicago

Under this pattern of life hatred and bitterness between the two races subsided and disappeared in the South.

For seventy-five years, the two races worked together in a state of peace and in a spirit of goodwill and friendship.

As a result of this seventy-five year period the white people and the Negroes of the South made greater progress than any people inhabiting a similar geographic area have ever made in all of the history of mankind.

This progress was made without any help from the federal government. This progress was made without any Marshall Plan to rehabilitate the economy of a defeated people.

Built Own System

The whites and the Negroes under this plan built out of the ruins and ashes of destruction a fine and prosperous section of the nation.

This progress was made with the open hostility of most of the rest of the nation and without any help or friendship whatever.

Even the Negroes in the South received no helping hand from the nation or the people outside of the South.

The white and Negro people of the South have literally pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

In so doing, they have proved to the world the rightness and the value of the pattern of segregation to both races.