Summary of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots
As the Great Migration brought African Americans to Chicago, whites conspired to relegate blacks to particularly undesirable areas of the city. By 1915, most African Americans lived within a narrow strip on Chicago’s South Side known as the Black Belt. By the time of the First World War—in which many black men served—Chicago had become a great industrial center, attracting both raw materials and new residents to support the war effort overseas. But the need for soldiers in the trenches and stricter immigration laws slowed the flow of immigrants from Europe. Employers hired thousands of black southerners who sought freedom from Jim Crow. In a few short years, fifty thousand African Americans from the South relocated to Chicago, dreaming of a fresh start promised by the city’s preeminent black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.
Black southerners found better wages in Chicago, but what else defined their experiences of possibility and constraint? As the Black Belt swelled across racial boundaries, whites formed neighborhood associations to pressure property owners not to rent or sell to black residents. Whites also turned to violence, throwing homemade bombs at dozens of African American homes, while working-class gangs from predominantly Irish neighborhoods policed racial boundaries by chasing, beating, and even killing African Americans simply for setting foot on white turf. In June 1919, two black men were killed in one night by white mobs on the South Side. Police investigators failed to make any arrests, despite numerous witnesses.
On Sunday, July 27, 1919, an unusually hot summer day, Eugene Williams and some friends unintentionally navigated a homemade wooden raft across an imaginary Lake Michigan boundary line, a few yards out from a “white” beach at 29th street. Beachgoers witnessed George Stauber, a twenty-four-year-old white man, hurl stones at the boys until Williams fell off the raft, plunged into the lake, and drowned. The first police officer at the scene, Daniel Callahan, refused to take Stauber into custody. Police reinforcements arrived to confront a crowd of despondent African Americans gathered near the beach that evening. A black man fired a gun at the officers. Police returned fire and killed the gunman.
As word spread, the city erupted in racial violence. Whites loaded into automobiles and sped through black streets, firing indiscriminately at African Americans and their homes. As whites attacked, black people fought back in unprecedented numbers: a street-level expression of the growing race consciousness catching fire across the country during what writer James Weldon Johnson called the “Red Summer.” The National Guard arrived to quell violence, but eventually a steady rain proved most effective in restoring peace. In the end, thirty-eight people were killed—twenty-three black and fifteen white—and 520 Chicagoans were injured. Two-thirds of them were African American, as were two-thirds of the 138 persons indicted for riot-related crimes by the state’s attorney’s office. In other words, blacks had somehow made up most of the victims and most of the perpetrators during the race riots.
The riots were terrible; so was their aftermath and expulsion from history. Civic leaders lacked the funds or the will to prosecute most rioters. Only a handful were tried or saw any prison time—most of them black. Many of the riot’s most vicious offenders were whites protected by law enforcement and local politicians. Chicago’s “respectable” white citizens dismissed the riots as the work of the city’s lower-class element, white and black, who lacked education and morality. It was in the best interests of decent people, they argued, to separate these whites and blacks to avoid future trouble.
The governor of Illinois called for an investigation of racial conditions in the city of Chicago. The resulting Chicago Commission on Race Relations was made up of prominent whites and blacks, an extraordinary effort at cross-racial collaboration, research, and resolution. African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson carried out most of the research. The six-hundred-plus-page report remains a landmark of sociology, and their findings of systemic racism were voluminous, but the Commission’s recommendations were weak.
Chicago’s 1919 race riots remind us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about segregation: it was invented and maintained through a powerful blend of violence, intimidation, and law. Yet we might remember that conflict resolution is also in our history: we hold the potential to come together in recognition and reconciliation. For one hundred years later, whether we remember the riots or not, we still live within this legacy.
