Chicago Race Riot Of 1919

The Chicago race riot of 1919 was a violent racial conflict between white Americans and black Americans that began on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on July 27 and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot, 38 people died (23 black and 15 white). Over the week, injuries attributed to the episodic confrontations stood at 537, two thirds black and one third white; and between 1,000 and 2,000 residents, most of them black, lost their homes. Due to its sustained violence and widespread economic impact, it is considered the worst of the scores of riots and civil disturbances across the United States during the "Red Summer" of 1919, so named because of its racial and labor violence. It was also one of the worst riots in the history of Illinois.

In early 1919, the sociopolitical atmosphere of Chicago around its rapidly-growing black community was one of ethnic tension caused by long-standing racism, competition among new groups, an economic slump, and the social changes engendered by World War I. With the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans from the American South had settled next to neighborhoods of European immigrants on Chicago's South Side near jobs in the stockyards, meatpacking plants, and industry. Meanwhile, the long-established Irish fiercely defended their neighborhoods and political power against all newcomers. Post-World War I racism and social tensions built up in the competitive labor and housing markets. Overcrowding and increased African American resistance against racism, especially by war veterans, contributed to the racial tension, as well as white ethnic gangs unrestrained by police.

The turmoil came to a boil during a summer heat wave with the murder of the 17-year-old Eugene Williams, an African American teenager who had inadvertently drifted into a white swimming area at an informally- segregated beach near 29th Street. A group of African-American youths were diving from a 14 foot by 9 foot raft that they had constructed. When the raft drifted into the "white beach area," one white beachgoer was indignant, began hurling rocks at the young men, striking Williams, and caused the teen to drown. The official coroner's report cited that Williams drowned because the stone-throwing had kept him from coming to shore. When black beach-goers complained that whites attacked them, violence expanded into neighborhoods in which white mobs attacked innocent black residents. Tensions between groups arose in a melee, which became days of unrest. Black neighbors near white areas were attacked, white gangs went into black neighborhoods, and black workers going to and from work were attacked. Meanwhile, some black civilians organized to resist and protect each other, and some whites sought to lend aid to black civilians, but the Chicago Police Department often turned a blind eye, or worse. Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson had a game of brinksmanship with Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, which may have exacerbated the riot since Thompson refused to ask Lowden to send in the Illinois Army National Guard for four days although Lowden had called up the guardsmen, organized in Chicago's armories and ready to intervene.

After the riots, Lowden convened the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a nonpartisan interracial committee to investigate the causes and to propose solutions to racial tensions. Their conclusions were published in 1922 by the University of Chicago Press as ''The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot''. US President Woodrow Wilson and the US Congress attempted to promote legislation and organizations to decrease racial discord in America. Governor Lowden took several actions at Thompson's request to quell the riot and promote greater harmony in its aftermath. Sections of Chicago industry were shut down for several days during and after the riots to avoid interaction among the opposing groups. Thompson drew on his association with the riot to influence later political elections. One of the most lasting effects may have been decisions in both white and black communities to seek greater racial separation.

Background

Unlike southern cities at the time, Chicago did not segregate most public accommodations. According to Walter Francis White of the NAACP, pre-1915 Chicago had a good reputation for equitable treatment of African Americans. However, in the early 20th-century Chicago beaches were unofficially racially segregated. African Americans had a long history in Chicago, with the city sending Illinois' first African-American representative, John W. E. Thomas, to the state legislature in 1876. While blacks in 1900 were only about 1 percent of the total population of a city that had seen large European immigration, the black population expanded dramatically in the early years of the 20th century. By 1910, thousands of African Americans were moving from the South to Chicago, as a major destination in the Great Migration to industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest, fleeing lynchings, segregation and disenfranchisement in the Deep South. The revived Ku Klux Klan in the South committed 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919. With industrial jobs in the stockyards and meatpacking industry opening as European immigration was cut off by World War I, from 1916 to 1919 the African-American population in Chicago increased by 148% from 44,000 to 109,000.

The growing African-American population settling in the South Side bordered a neighborhood of Irish Americans existing since the mid-19th century, and the two groups competed for low-end jobs and housing, alongside earlier waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Ethnic groups were possessive of their neighborhoods, which their young men often patrolled against outsiders. Because of agricultural problems, Southern whites also migrated to the city, about 20,000 by this period. The rapid influx of migrants caused overcrowding from a lack of low-cost housing.

In 1917, two summers before the Chicago riot, large and deadly race riots broke out in the expanding cities of East St. Louis, Illinois and Houston, Texas, influencing the violent events of Red Summer across the nation and in Chicago. The postwar period also found tensions rising in numerous rapidly-growing cities where people from different cultures jostled against each other and competed for space. In 1917, the privately run Chicago Real Estate Board established a policy of block by block segregation. New arrivals in the Great Migration generally settled in older black neighborhoods on the South Side. By 1920, the area held 85% of Chicago's African Americans, middle, upper class and poor

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