Stormy Protests on Sex Crimes: Local Debates about Race and Rape in Postwar Chicagoland

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In the fall of 1945 peacetime celebrations had barely concluded when the Chicago Daily Tribune's front page warned that Chicago police were cooperating with officers from Evanston - a suburb adjacent to the city's north side - to help them curb a "wave of sex and other crimes against women." White residents living in and near Evanston read in horror about "an army air hero's mother" who was assaulted by "an unidentified Negro."12 Chicago's African-American residents read a different version of these events when the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, reported that "Evanston's Crime Wave Fizzles," and that the city should "blame police chief for rape …