Tales of Terror

In Chicago's Lawndale district on the west side of the city, the dark, slum-speckled streets breed a tale of terror. One night six Negro boys jumped out of the dark and lashed a 69-year-old white man with bicycle chains. Another gang waylaid a 12-year-old white boy in a schoolyard and bludgeoned him. Four white men dragged a Negro from his car, beat and robbed him, then for good measure smashed the car against a pole.

Last week, in the face of continuing brutality, 79 extra policemen patrolled Lawndale's deserted streets, some of them paced by a snarling police dog. On Cermak Road, the boundary between the community's white and Negro neighborhoods, stores shut down or were empty of customers. Said a police sergeant: "In my 30 years here, there has never been such a rash of racial violence."

But Chicago, which has already logged more incidents this year than in all of 1960, is not alone among Northern cities with its growing tension. Detroit is edgily watching interracial efforts to integrate a suburban swimming pool. And in New York one humid night last week, 60 silent members of a gang that calls itself the Harlem Lords marched across a Harlem River bridge for a rumble in The Bronx. Armed with linoleum knives, lengths of pipe and baling hooks, they warmed up by attacking 20 pedestrians. They were finally stopped by two policemen who held them back with drawn pistols until eight radio cars rolled up.

"Race Riots." To New York's Amsterdam News, these tales of taut cities all add up to the same thing. RACE RIOTS screamed the Negro newspaper last week in a blaring black-and-white headline. More responsible--and much more alarmed--human relations experts rate racial tensions this summer dangerously high. In each community, young Negroes are frustrated by a double burden. They are unschooled, unskilled and, as a result, unemployable in today's tight labor market. And with more and more Negroes moving up from the South, they have been jammed together in steamy ghettos because white landlords elsewhere will not rent to Negroes.

"Just the right incident," says Detroit Urban League Vocational Director Ernest Brown, "can be the bomb." Chicago, where tempers are tightest, has had three bombs: white violence against Negroes who took fire refuge in a white church (TIME, July 7); Negro wade-ins at all-white Rainbow Beach, where the sight of white demonstrators being dragged off by Negro cops did little to ease tensions; an unsolved Lawndale shooting, which Negroes blame on white youths.

Real Enemy. In each city, police specialists and interracial civilian groups battle the gathering trouble. Chicago youth workers have infiltrated Lawndale Negro teen-age gangs. But they admit to only "minimal results," because they can offer no positive antidote to unemployment and tenement housing. Nor in any of the three cities has there been the necessary citywide reaction against violence. Worst of all, as summer wears on and interracial ugliness increases, there is no practical way to counteract the crudest antagonist stalking the dark city streets. Said Chicago Police Sergeant Thomas Marriner last week: "Our real enemy is rumor."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.