"They Got Too Mad"

All summer long, Chicago, with its 1,040,000 Negroes, half of whom are jammed into the city's seamy South Side, held its municipal breath while racial violence flared in the ghettos of half a dozen Eastern cities. Surprisingly, Chicago did not explode. Then last week, in the unlikely setting of a pleasant ranch-house-dotted suburb called Dixmoor, Chicago got its nights of racial terror.

Roughed Up. They began when a Negro woman who was arrested for trying to steal a pint of gin charged that she had been roughed up by Dixmoor Liquor Store Owner Michael ("Big Mike") LaPota, 52, a 265-lb. ex-con. Soon the story spread through Dixmoor and into the neighboring town of Harvey. A crowd of Negroes gathered in a parking lot across the street from LaPota's shop, chanting to the accompaniment of bongos, "Big Mike must go!" For hours, Negro rabble-rousers harangued the mob with inflammatory speeches. Someone threw a rock through the closed liquor store's window, and the mob followed, snatching up bottles. Dixmoor's ten-man police force called for help.

By the time state police, sheriff's officers and cops from neighboring communities arrived, the mob had swelled to 1,000 and the riot was in full swing. Negroes swarmed into a main street, smashing windows and headlights of passing cars. A white man, Clarence Stermer, 59, suffered a heart attack when his car was bombarded with rocks. For four hours lawmen used tear gas and high-pressure fire hoses to sweep back the mob. Next night Molotov cocktails arced out of the darkness onto the roof of La-Pota's store, setting it afire--and the riot erupted again. This time it ran for 31 hours. In all, 50 people were hurt, and the police arrested 71 Negroes and whites. What was worse was the realization that Dixmoor's long history of amicable race relations had been left as shattered as the windshields.

Across the Line. Dixmoor, just south of Chicago's city limits, had hardly seemed ripe for racial trouble. The average family income there is $5,000 to $7,000. Some 60% of Dixmoor's 3,100 residents are Negroes, many of whom are white-collar workers living in $10,000-to-$15,000 single-family homes or in attractive new apartment buildings. Three of Dixmoor's six governing trustees are Negroes, as are half of its part-time police force. But for all that, civil rights leaders in the Dixmoor-Harvey area charge that Negroes are discriminated against in jobs, housing and schools. And when the trouble began in Dixmoor, Harvey Negroes had only to walk across the village line to be in the thick of it.

Said Eugene Callahan, director of Chicago's Conference on Religion and Race: "There's unemployment because the mills and factories in the Harvey area aren't doing well right now. Hardly any local businesses in Harvey hire Negroes. And I understand Negroes can't get liquor licenses. Naturally they resent the fact that right across the street is a white man running a big liquor store, and he's got a prison record, and he's a big brute besides." Added Callahan: "CORE has complained about these things for months. The Negroes didn't get mad enough; then, the trouble was, they got too mad."

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