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arrival in New York, and offer federal cooperation in any additional
measures that might be needed to restore peace to the City of Angels.
At week's end the Federal Government agreed to transport up to 6,000
additional Guardsmen from northern California. By Sunday night,
officials planned to have at least 10,000 troops on the scene. In
addition, the Pentagon ordered into Los Angeles an 840-man U.S. Marine
Reserve detachment. The marines were equipped with 40,000 rounds of
ammunition.
Like bubbles in hot asphalt, violence popped up elsewhere across the
land. The next serious outburst erupted in Chicago. It, too, started
with an incident that might have passed unnoticed in a less volatile
time. Answering what turned out to be a false alarm in Garfield Park,
a Negro neighborhood about five miles west of the Loop, a speeding
hook-and-ladder truck knocked down a sign pole, killing Dessie Mae
Williams, 23, a Negro. It was a bad setting for such an accident. Only
a month earlier, a militant civil rights group called ACT had led 60
marchers to the West Garfield firehouse to demand that the all-white
company hire Negroes. After Dessie Williams' death last week, some 200
Negroes gathered around the firehouse, shouting, jeering and throwing
rocks. They taunted the firemen by setting small piles of debris
ablaze, hurled a Molotov cocktail onto the roof of a mobile classroom
across the street. Heaving missiles and assaulting whites, the crowd
spread over a twelve-block area before it was dispersed. Seven persons
were injured, among them four policemen hit by bricks and bottles.
Not Satisfied. Next morning the Fire Department suspended the fire-truck
driver and the company's captain—and shifted a predominantly Negro
company to the firehouse. But the disorders flared even higher that
day, possibly fanned by a leaflet distributed by ACT that proclaimed:
"DRUNKEN WHITE FIREMAN KILLS BLACK WOMAN"—prefaced in minute type:
"Allegedly."
The second-day riot lasted for nine hours; 18 policemen and 42 civilians
were hospitalized, 105 persons jailed. The FBI was investigating the
origin of another, anonymous leaflet distributed in the area. "After
years of frame-ups, brutality and intimidation," it said, "the black
people are throwing off the control of the same rulers who are making
war on working people throughout the world—in Viet Nam, the Dominican
Republic and the Congo." At week's end Chicago—where civil rights
groups have long campaigned against Mayor Richard Daley and School
Superintendent Benjamin Willis—was quiet. But Governor Otto Kerner, at
the request of Chicago police, ordered 2,000 Illinois National
Guardsmen into the city to stand by in armories in case of further
trouble.
Then Springfield. Violence then leapfrogged east to the rifle
manufacturing city of Springfield, Mass. Trouble had been brewing since
last month, when police arrested 17 Negroes during a disturbance
outside a nightclub. A crowd of 300 accused the officers of brutality
and attacked them with bottles and rocks. Last week 23 persons, 18
Negroes and five whites, including a 46-year-old white lawyer's wife,
began a 24-hour-a-day sit-in at city hall, ostensibly to protest the
fact that the cops had not been transferred to another area pending an
investigation.
After four days, police hauled the demonstrators off to jail. That night
two youths
