The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

whites’ use only. The swimmer drowned, and policemen at the scene refused
to arrest the attacker. Subsequent battles between whites and blacks left
thirty-eight dead (twenty-three of whom were African American) and
poisoned race relations in Chicago for years afterward.
Interracial violence continued unabated. In the first five years after World
War II, 357 reported “incidents” were directed against African Americans
attempting to rent or buy in Chicago’s racial border areas. From mid-1944 to
mid-1946, there were forty-six attacks on the homes of African Americans in
white communities adjacent to Chicago’s overcrowded black neighborhoods;
of these, twenty-nine were arson-bombings, resulting in at least three deaths.
In the first ten months of 1947 alone, twenty-six arson-bombings occurred,
without an arrest.
In 1951, Harvey Clark, an African American Chicago bus driver and air
force veteran, rented an apartment in all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb. At
first, the police forcefully attempted to prevent him, his wife Johnnetta, and
two small children from occupying the apartment. They threatened him with
arrest and worse if the family did not depart. “Get out of Cicero,” the police
chief told the real estate agent who rented the apartment, adding, “Don’t
come back . . . or you’ll get a bullet through you.” When Harvey Clark got a
court injunction ordering the police to cease interfering with his occupancy
and “to afford him full protection from any attempt to so restrain him,” the
police ignored it, making no effort, for example, to impede a group of
teenagers who were pelting the apartment’s windows with stones. When the
Clarks refused to leave, a mob of about 4,000 rioted, raiding the apartment,
destroying the fixtures, and throwing the family’s belongings out the
window onto the lawn where they were set ablaze. The officers present
arrested no one. Time magazine reported that the police “acted like ushers
politely handling the overflow at a football stadium.”
Governor Adlai Stevenson mobilized the National Guard to restore order.
Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict
a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real
estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the
apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot and
conspiring to lower property values. Thirty-six years later, when an African
American family again attempted to live in Cicero, it was met with
firebombs and rifle shots. Nobody was convicted of these attacks, either.