an end to the strike. Samuel also refused to grant air time to War Production Board representatives who wanted to make a radio plea to end the strike. On August 2, the mayor declined, without an explanation, the NAACP request for permission to send two sound-trucks into black neighborhoods to broadcast appeals for calm. The city's black population felt disappointed and disenchanted with the actions of the local administration. Public reaction Except for a few incidents, the city of Philadelphia remained calm during the strike and, despite considerable fears of race riots, there were no major outbreaks of violence. At the start of the strike there were some incidents of vandalism and store window smashing, and the police arrested about 300 people, most of them blacks. In a nastier episode, three white motorists drove a car through a black neighborhood and, without stopping or warning, shot at a 13-year-old black boy, who received non-critical injuries. The most visible episode of unrest came when a black war factory worker, whose brother was in the Army, threw a paperweight at the Liberty Bell shouting "Liberty Bell, oh Liberty Bell—liberty, that's a lot of bunk!" He was arrested and sent by the magistrate for a psychiatric evaluation. However, by and large, calm prevailed and there were no major outbreaks of violence and no deaths or critical injuries among the public. The public opinion and the media in the city were overwhelmingly against the strikers. All the city's newspapers ran editorials denouncing the strike, which was perceived as unpatriotic and harmful to the war effort; a number of editorials also decried the racial nature of the strike. Most letters to the editor condemned the strike. The radio stations in the city denounced the strike as well, as did the national press. The New York Times wrote "It would be hard to find in the whole history of American labor a strike in which so much damage has been done for so base a purpose". A Wall Street Journal editorial condemned the strike but stated that the powers exercised by the government in ending the strike were only justified by the war time conditions. The conservative-leaning Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, while denouncing the strike, tried to put the blame for causing it on the CIO-affiliated Transport Workers Union, and accused the Roosevelt administration of acting too slowly because of its support for