Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/255

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE NEGRO
231

Rioting Breaks Loose

The dozen negroes who had accompanied Finnessy's assailant were attacked by the mob of men, aided by a lot of white laborers of that neighborhood, who fled out of their homes with all sorts of weapons. They rushed at the negroes, beat them with stones, sticks, billiard-cues, glasses and bottles, cut a number of them and bruised all, and drove them into the darkness or to their homes.

All the time women and children were fleeing to their own or neighbors' homes, and whites and blacks were running out of their houses to help men of their own race. Many negroes live on One Hundred and Sixty-fifth street, near Washington avenue, and many of them ran out with knives and whatever they could use as weapons, the whites running, out with similar weapons. None had revolvers, and no shots were fired, but this is believed to be caused by the fact that people about there are too poor to have pistols.

The neighborhood was in a state of terror. Yells of brutal vengeance, of triumph, of terror, or pain, of anger and of command came from one side and the other as whites and negroes clashed and beat each other. Policeman Belton, of the Morrisania station, ran up with a club, but no one paid any attention to him, and he ran to a telephone, calling on his station for aid and the Lebanon Hospital for an ambulance and surgeon for Finnessy. Half a dozen detectives ran down from Morrisania station, but they saw such a hopeless riot before them that the reserves were asked for immediately, and the wagonful of men was run down as fast as the horses could draw it.


Many Men Hurt Fighting

Dozens of white and colored men were cut in the fight. Many cut negroes, with faces bleeding, were seen running into their homes near by. After a little time they found themselves so inferior in numbers that they retreated, and the white men, yelling triumph-