Day 185: The Scourge of Black Metropolis

Author's Note: The inspiration for this entry comes from an article that ran in the Chicago Tribune a few days ago.  For more on Two-Gun Pete, check it out.

     In the mid-1940s. the 5th District on Chicago's South Side was home to roughly 200,000 people and was the crime capital of the city, leading all other districts in robberies, rapes, and murders.  The area was rightly known as the "bucket of blood".  In the middle of all this lawlessness(and at times fighting a seemingly one-man war against it) stood a hard-boiled cop by the name of Sylvester Washington.

     Of course, today he might be more well-known by his nickname of Two Gun Pete, the deadliest police officer to ever walk the streets of Chicago.  According to his own claims, he gunned down 12 criminals between 1934 and 1951 and made 20,000 arrests during that same time period.  Once the city council saw all of the crime that was befalling primarily Black areas of the city, they requested that several black policemen start to step up their enforcement in those areas.  What nobody could have predicted was that they had just set an officer upon Black Metropolis(the place that we know of today as Bronzeville) who was "the meanest, cruelest person that I have ever seen in my entire life" (as his third wife said of him).  This reputation of being a cold, uncaring man preceded him.  So much so, that all he had to do to clear out a street was announce his presence, whereupon the street would be a ghost town in seconds, the prostitutes would hide out, and any wrongdoers would willingly walk unescorted to the local police station.

     Of course, any cop with a legend of Washington's level must have had some pretty distinctive sidearms, right?  Of course he did.  Washington wore two pearl-handled .357 Magnums on a belt, with the handles positioned perfectly for the quick draw.  He began carrying them after his first take down of a perp, where he almost emptied out his gun in the fracas.  As the years wore on, Washington's legend and celebrity grew.  When the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Cubs with their second baseman Jackie Robinson, Washington was there to patrol and keep the peace.  Finally, Washington's actions caught up with him in 1951, when a grand jury asked him the intuitive question of how a cop making $3,600 a year could afford a $40,000 house.  In October of the same year, Washington retired from the force.  He died in 1971, but at least one of his guns live on in the possession of the daughter of one of Washington's friends.

     Overall, the legacy of Two-Gun Pete is best captured by legendary music producer Quincy Jones:  "Every weekend we watched a legendary black cop named Two-Gun Pete who carried two pearl-handled revolvers shoot black kids in the back in broad daylight, right in front of a Walgreen's drugstore — the kids dropped like potato sacks," Jones wrote in his autobiography. "We fantasized about making Two-Gun Pete pay."