Chicago's Black Traffic in White GirlsTurner-Zimmermann, Jean
History
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Turner-Zimmermann, Jean
Chicago (Ill.) -- Moral conditions; Prostitution -- Illinois -- Chicago
"There was a quarrel over the girl during which some people from the
outside were attracted to the house by the commotion. Citro, becoming
frightened, fled down the street, and as he ran, threw away the
revolver with which he had tried to shoot the father of the barber
during the quarrel, over the fence into a coal yard. After running
two blocks, he was caught and arrested. Upon these facts this
procurer, Citro, alias Kelly, was prosecuted and found guilty under
the new pandering law of Illinois, and received a sentence of one
year of imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars. The poor
father and mother, distressed and heart-broken, were in Court during
the trial with their arms around each other, sobbing with joy because
their little girl had been found. Pizza[3], the owner of the place,
was indicted by the State grand jury, but escaped to Italy. This case
is told to show how girls leave home upon the promise of securing
employment and are in this way procured for places of ill-repute."
Chicago's Soul Market.
"O, he keeps a bunch of 'fillies' in a shanty down near the corner of
Monroe and Peoria streets, and they're not foreigners, either. They're
American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance
from a roll of yellow backs."
The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a
motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and
gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on
the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in
that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on
the horses of the Louisville race track.
There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face
hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity
of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black
was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just
across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star
and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam
of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room
for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed
book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track
favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a
fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an
immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds--he counted them until
three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a "clocker tip" in that
day's last race in Louisville.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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