Reading American Past an African American Response to the Chicago Race Riot
Armed National Guards and African American men standing on a sidewalk during the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum hide caption
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Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
Armed National Guards and African American men continuing on a sidewalk during the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919.
Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
Exactly 100 years ago today, Chicago was in the throes of a brutal heat wave. Thousands flocked to the beaches lining Lake Michigan for some relief. Amid them: a grouping of black boys that included 17-year-old Eugene Williams. Eugene, who was on a raft, inadvertently drifted over the invisible line that separated the black and white sections of the 29th St Embankment. One white beachgoer, insulted, began throwing rocks at the black kids. Eugene Williams slipped off his raft and drowned.
That incident ignited a race anarchism that would go down in history every bit one of the country's bloodiest, and least-known, to date.
And Chicago wasn't the just place this happened. What would come up to be referred to as the country's Cherry Summer was a serial of race riots that occurred for several months in different places around the land. In Chicago, Eugene Williams' death was what sparked the city'southward riots, just kindling for that fire had been edifice for at least a few years.
For one thing, the metropolis's demographics were changing very quickly. 100-twelvemonth-quondam Timuel Black Jr. is a historian, educator and activist who has lived most of his long life in Chicago. He came to the metropolis with his parents as an infant a few months afterwards the riot, just stories from relatives and neighbors fabricated it very articulate why so many black folks were streaming into Chicago.
People, Black said, "wanted to move forward and break the barriers of segregation." According to Black, three major factors were propelling blackness Southerners forward: "to escape the tyranny and violence of the Ku Klux Klan, to be able to vote without fear and to get better instruction for their children," he says.
So many newcomers at one time strained the city's resources. "At the fourth dimension, people in Northern cities—especially Chicago—saw it equally an invasion," says John Russick of the Chicago History Museum.
The Southward Side neighborhoods to which black Chicagoans had been traditionally relegated were bursting at the seams. There was violent competition for the existing apartments and homes, even though many of them were substandard.
Calculation to the tension: soldiers were returning home after serving in Europe during Globe War I. Blackness soldiers, in particular, had experienced existence treated equally complete citizens while they fought abroad. Returning to an America that barely recognized their service and wanted them dorsum in their assigned, segregated places was non something they were willing to accept.
Adding to the tension was tearing competition over jobs. The black newcomers readily accustomed jobs in the city'south slaughterhouses and meatpacking companies because the pay was amend than what they'd received in the South. That outraged the European immigrants—Irish, Italian, Czech and Polish—who'd traditionally held those jobs and who wanted to unionize the companies they'd worked for.
So pressure was edifice, and Eugene Williams' tragic death at the beach was the final straw. Liesl Olson is director of the Chicago History project at the Newberry Library, and says, to add insult to the injury of Eugene's death, "a white policeman refused to arrest the white human being who'd caused an African American teenaged boy's expiry."
The police force's inaction doesn't surprise John Russick. "The white police force were a tool of white supremacy in Chicago at this time," he explains. "All of the tools of power were in the hands of white people in 1919, and we can't lose sight of that."
Anger escalated on the black side of the beach when it became apparent that no arrest would be fabricated. More constabulary arrived. Ane especially distraught blackness beachgoer pulled out a gun and fired into a knot of police. He was shot dead immediately.
A grouping of men and armed National Guard in front of the Ogden Cafe during the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum hibernate caption
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Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
The tale of Eugene's death and the shooting that followed angered groups of young white men. Some climbed into cars and began racing through major streets in the city's blackness neighborhoods, randomly firing at homes and businesses. Others armed themselves with guns, sticks and rocks and began marching up 35thursday street, assaulting any blackness person unfortunate enough to cantankerous their path.
Juanita Mitchell had just come to Chicago with her family. They were staying with relatives until they found their own place. Mrs. Mitchell is 107 at present, just withal conspicuously recalls her terror as the eight-twelvemonth-quondam girl she was and so.
"I remember how afraid my mother was, how agape my aunt was," she says. "I recall my uncle continuing in the window and I heard him say 'hither they come'—which meant the race riot was coming down 35th and Giles."
Her uncle was armed "with the biggest gun I had always seen," Mitchell recalls. He was prepared to protect his family. So were many of the returning black veterans. A grouping of National Guard reserve men who'd returned from France after fighting valiantly there, broke into an armory and grabbed guns and other weapons, adamant to protect black lives and property.
That resistance was a watershed, says Timuel Black Jr. "I sympathize that this was the first time these Northern Negroes fought back from an attack and been successful."
So successful, in fact, that the riot soon wound downward.
"From what I've been told by my family who was here, the riot was before long over, considering the Westside rioters felt they were in danger, now that these Negroes returning from the war had weapons equal to their weapons."
When the smoke cleared and the ashes cooled, 38 people—23 blackness, xv white—were dead. More than 350 people reported injuries.
African American victim of race riot stoning lying on basis, with police force standing higher up, Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum hide caption
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Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
African American victim of race anarchism stoning lying on ground, with police force standing to a higher place, Chicago, Illinois, 1919.
Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
And it wasn't only Chicago: more than ii dozen cities throughout the land had their own Scarlet Summers—in Washington DC, Houston and Charleston all experienced racial violence. In Elaine, Arkansas, some 200 people were presumed dead.
"The struggle over jobs, the return of black soldiers from the war and not beingness treated with respect and non finding employment - those tensions were in then many places," says Liesl Olson.
In Chicago, some i,000 black homes had been burned down. None of the white participants in the riot ever faced consequences for their involvement.
"Information technology shouldn't exist a surprise to anyone, looking back 100 years later, that the response to the violence perpetrated upon African Americans in the wake of the incident at the embankment wasn't aggressively prosecuted or even investigated afterwards the fact," says John Russick.
And although that was true in the firsthand aftermath, a commission, established by the governor, released a report three years later: The Negro In Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. The commission members, vi black men, six white men, looked at the root causes backside the riot and ended, every bit would the Kerner Commission Report fifty years after, that racial inequality was a major reason for the violence.
Row of armed National Guard sitting in front of a storefront during the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum hide caption
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Jun Fujita/Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
That was and then. What almost now? Is the Red Summertime relevant to us today?
John Russick thinks so. "Nosotros think these things can't happen again," he says. "We call back of the past beingness past, but at this moment, the race riots are with united states of america still. We're all the same struggling with how to become forth with each other."
Eve Ewing teaches at the University of Chicago and has just published a new book, 1919, which retells the cataclysmic events of the Red Summertime through poems. Past, says Ewing, is, sadly, prologue.
"What does it mean to take the story of Eugene Williams, 17 year-onetime blackness boy, which and then becomes the story of Emmett Till, which ten becomes the story of Laquan McDonald?" she asks. "What does it mean for usa to be constantly living this recurring nightmare?"
Chicagoans have been examining just that all year long, in an endeavor to better empathize Cerise Summertime. This weekend, there volition exist services, lectures, fifty-fifty a walking bout of some Red Summertime sites, in an try to larn from--and not echo--this chapter of the city'due south history.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/07/27/744130358/red-summer-in-chicago-100-years-after-the-race-riots
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