In that great city of two and a half million of inhabitants, after ten days of riot, bloodshed, arson and murder, in response to the appeal of representative citizens, Governor Lowden appointed an emergency committee to study the underlying causes of the riot of 1919 and to make recommendations. According to the Census of 1920 there were then in Chicago 109,458 Negroes. The chairman of the committee was Edgar A. Bancroft, a leading lawyer, subsequently appointed by President Coolidge Ambassador to Japan. The vice chairman was Dr. Francis W. Sheppardson, at one time of the University of Chicago. The most prominent Negro on the Committee was Robert S. Abbott, proprietor of the greatest and most influential Negro paper in the United States, _The Chicago Defender_. The report was published in 1922. It indicates 38 persons killed in the riot, 15 whites and 23 Negroes. Of the 527 injured, 178 were white, 342 Negroes, the race denomination of 17 not being established. For the 38 deaths, there were nine presentments for murder returned, four persons being convicted. While it is stated that the merciless bombing of Negro households was due to a systematic campaign conducted by the press against Negroes buying properties to one side of the district in which 90 per cent of the Negro population reside, that they moved, (on account of their increase), towards the side to which they did go, rather than in the opposite direction, the report says— “may be explained partly by the hostility which the Irish and Polish groups had often shown to Negroes.”[393] That Negroes were killed deliberately, as a business measure, in response to propaganda against them simply as Negroes, is an unavoidable conclusion. Extracts from “The Property Owners Journal” show that again and again there was an attempt to appeal to a “Higher Law” than the law of the land. It seems to have been the law of greed. Here is an extract: “Any property owner who sells property anywhere in our district to undesirables is an enemy to the white owner and should be discovered and punished.... The Negro is using the Constitution and its legal rights to abuse the moral rights of the white.”[394]