Not talking about the 1919 race riots has been the Chicago Way for 100 years, but ignoring one of the ugliest periods in the city's history is hampering its present and future.
PUBLISHED ON JUL 23, 2019 8:31AM CDTBRONZEVILLE, NEAR SOUTH SIDE PRIMARY CATEGORY IN WHICH BLOG POST IS PUBLISHED
Patty Wetli@pattywetli
Features contributor
It's Been 100 Years: Is Chicago Finally Ready To Reckon With the City's 1919 Race Riots?
BRONZEVILLE — Before Laquan McDonald, before Emmett Till, there was Eugene Williams. In the summer of 1919, the murder of Williams, a black teenager, at
blockclubchicago.org
BRONZEVILLE — Before Laquan McDonald, before Emmett Till, there was Eugene Williams.
In the summer of 1919, the murder of Williams, a black teenager, at the hands of a white man, and the subsequent refusal of police to arrest Williams’ killer touched off the fiercest and deadliest rioting Chicago has ever seen.
Over the course of five days, 38 people were killed, 520 were injured and nearly a thousand left homeless — a shocking wave of violence the city has rarely talked about much less reckoned with.
Until now.
A coalition of organizations and institutions, led by the Newberry Library, has coalesced around the 100th anniversary of the violence, producing “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” a year-long citywide program of events.
Historian Brad Hunt, vice president for research and academic programs at the Newberry Library, has coordinated much of the programming, including a bike ride through many of the key 1919 sites.
The goal, he explained, is both simple and complex: to spark conversation among Chicagoans about an ugly past in order to understand the present and chart a better way forward for the city’s future.
“Difficult history makes people uncomfortable,” said Hunt, but ignoring events like the riots — in which the majority of the victims were black and the majority of the aggressors were white male youths — means “we’re not doing the healing work.”
“We all have a responsibility to know and understand this past,” Hunt said. “There’s so little discussion. I want people to understand that where we are today didn’t just happen.”
A line in the sand
On July 27, 1919 — a scorcher of a day with temperatures in the 90s and no such thing as air conditioning to mitigate the misery — 17-year-old Eugene Williams did what a lot of Chicagoans do to beat the heat. He headed to Lake Michigan.
Williams and his friends hit the water at 26th Street, because they were black and that was the stretch of waterfront assigned to people of color. The 29th Street side was for whites and though there may not have been a literal line in the sand, the boundary was strictly observed, not just on land but in the water too.
Whites had already defended their turf earlier in the day by hurling rocks, so they were ready when Williams and his pals, floating on a makeshift raft, drifted in the lake across the arbitrary color line.
A white man on the beach launched rocks at the raft and one either hit Williams and caused him to drown or he floundered under the water, where he’d ducked to avoid the missiles. Regardless, hours later, his lifeless body was pulled from the water. (The official coroner’s report said there had been no injury to Williams, but one of the boy’s friends, also afloat on the raft, insisted Eugene had been struck.)
Word of Williams drowning spread, along with the news that a white policeman on the scene, Officer Daniel Callahan, wouldn’t arrest the white man, George Stauber, witnesses had identified as the person who’d thrown the rock at Williams.
And that was all the spark it took to ignite racial tensions that had been smoldering in Chicago for years.
Deep roots of discrimination
Williams’ death may have lit the fuse, but the root cause of the 1919 riots ran deep, encompassing economics, politics, housing and the after-effects of World War I.
Between 1916 and 1918, 500,000 blacks fled the Jim Crow South for the North during an exodus known as the Great Migration. For many migrants, Chicago was considered the “top of the world,” and the city’s black population grew from 44,000 in 1910 to nearly 110,000 in 1920. Estimates suggest as many as 50,000 of those arrivals occurred between 1917 and 1918.
The newcomers often faced difficulty adjusting. Everything from the climate to the pace of work in the industrial North was different from the agrarian South. A massive gulf in education standards — a later report on the riots would characterize schools for blacks in the South as “lamentably poor” — meant that even many professional black migrants such as teachers were ill-equipped to pursue the same line of work in the North.
That left a large number of migrants to compete with Chicago’s poor whites for jobs as laborers, particularly in the stock yards, where management’s use of blacks as strike breakers only exacerbated whites’ views of the migrants as “invaders.” (This from a white population in Chicago that was itself 30 percent foreign-born at the time.)
“It’s xenophobia, essentially. Black migrants were seen as dirty and uneducated,” said Eve Ewing, a poet and assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who’s among the Newberry’s scholarly advisers on the riots.
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