Some of the men theorized that there must be some sort of black gang—“a band of colored fiends,” one man said—that was behind the assaults and the killings. According to one rumor circulating up and down the Avenue, the gang worked for a black labor union that had been trying to recruit the city’s servant women to join and demand higher wages—fifteen dollars a month—from their white employers. The gang supposedly had been hired to attack those women who wouldn’t sign up.
