One hundred years ago this summer, a black teen on a raft crossed an imaginary line into a “white” section of a Lake Michigan beach, was stoned by white bathers and drowned. The interracial battle on city streets that followed caused 38 deaths and set the stage for decades of segregation, discrimination and civic dysfunction.
Yet if you search the city for a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots, as the events of July 1919 are known, you’ll find just one small marker, according to organizers of an upcoming series of events. Along the lakefront near 29th Street, affixed to a boulder there is a plaque — funded by suburban high school students — that says, “Dedicated to All the Victims of the Race Riot That Began Near This Place.”
The city’s collective neglect of this dark and seminal moment in its history is a topic that the Newberry Library and 13 other Chicago institutions hope to address with the yearlong project “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” an initiative that the partners in the project will announce formally next week.
The goal is to use seminars, film, spoken word performance and even a bicycle tour to help “understand a history that frankly has been forgotten, has purposely not been remembered and certainly has not been commemorated,” said Liesl Olson, director of Chicago studies at the independent research library. “Most historians are kind of appalled by how little is discussed about this moment. There’s a lot of shame in it, really.”
The three-hour opening event will feature a young actor as Eugene Williams, the teenager who drowned on July 27, precipitating what the poet and journalist Carl Sandburg described as “fighting … that spread to all the borders of the Black Belt,” the South Side neighborhoods where the city’s rapidly growing African-American population was concentrated. “The riots furnished an excuse for every element of Gangland to go at it and test their prowess by the most ancient ordeals of the jungle.”
What he meant by that, Sandburg makes clear in the next sentence, was gangs of “white hoodlums” from the areas around the livestock yards and meat packing houses. They would meet resistance, led by newly returned black World War I veterans, and after five days 23 African Americans and 15 whites were dead, hundreds more injured and scores of properties vandalized.
Following the multimedia dramatic presentation at the inaugural event will be break-out sessions with speakers including historian Christopher Reed and Claire Hartfield, author of the 2018 children’s book “A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919.” The event takes place Feb. 23 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, one of the “Chicago 1919” partners (full schedule at chicago1919.org).
“We are at this centennial, and this is the main event commemorating it,” said Adam Green, a University of Chicago history professor and an adviser to the project. “It is hoped that, however belatedly, the city can find a way to convene its own initiative.”
Before 1919 there was tension over blacks moving into “white” neighborhoods and even some racially motivated bombings as the black population grew in the Great Migration, Green explained.
But after the riots, the city — meaning white Chicago — essentially decided to separate the races officially. “The city’s response to the cataclysmic events of the riot in many ways was to double down on segregation as a solution to keep the peace,” Green said. “So restrictive covenants, for instance, were first drafted and implemented by the Chicago Real Estate Board, the governing (industry) group in the city, in 1925. … Housing segregation of course has been a dominant shaping factor within the city and has largely structured it as a dual and unequal city in relation to whites and blacks.”
A similar inequality has applied in policing, a legacy that can be seen right up to recent headlines about police shootings of African Americans, said Simon Balto, a University of Iowa historian and another of the project’s advisers.
“Within the riot’s terrible violence, the police department revealed itself as an institution that would not work well for black people,” Balto writes in his forthcoming book “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power” (University of North Carolina Press). The historian will be a principal in the Oct. 15 discussion “Policing Racial Violence: 1919 and Beyond” at the Chicago History Museum.
“The more you learn about the period, the more it becomes clear that there are so many connections and lessons that are relevant for today,” said Eve L. Ewing, the poet and University of Chicago sociologist and another adviser to the project, via e-mail. “This is a moment in history that many people know nothing about, and we have a moment of possibility and opportunity to change that.”
Ewing will appear at the 9th of the 11 planned events, Sept. 24’s “The Language of Bronzeville: Literature and Race in Chicago” at the Newberry. This follows the June publication of her second poetry book, “1919” (Haymarket Books), examining the riots through the lens of a highly regarded report on Chicago race relations that the state commissioned in the aftermath.
“Each poem riffs off of an excerpt from the 1922 report “The Negro in Chicago,” Ewing explained on Twitter last year.
And the report itself is a superb document, the historians agreed, but its recommendations were basically ignored. Balto called it “this amazing documentation of racism, inequality, racial hostility that is percolating around Chicago in the buildup to 1919.”
Its principal author, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, would go on to become president of Fisk University, but much of the reporting for “The Negro in Chicago” was done before the riots, while Johnson was a researcher at the Chicago Urban League, the organization incorporated in 1917 to help Southern African Americans adjust to their new surroundings.
The Urban League is another of “Chicago 1919’s” partners. It had been thinking of doing a centenary commemoration on its own when it learned of the Newberry-led effort, funded by a $200,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and decided to join up, said interim president and CEO Barbara Lumpkin.
“We want to make certain people are aware and also that individuals will give some thought to what will be plausible solutions,” she said. “We’re still wrestling with some of the basic challenges that happened in 1919.”
Grappling with the Chicago Race Riots, one of the deadliest flare-ups in what has been dubbed the “Red Summer” of racial violence mostly against blacks across the U.S., has been only an intermittent and niche practice in Chicago.
You’ll find books dealing with the topic, like former Tribune writer Cameron McWhirter’s 2011 “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America” (Henry Holt). McWhirter will be part of the final scheduled event at the DuSable, the Nov. 14 screening of a rough cut of the documentary “Red Summer / Winter Blues.”
Periodically, people will stumble, too, upon the fact that the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sandburg not only covered the race riots as a journalist with the Chicago Daily News, but he did detailed reporting on the social conditions that led to them in the weeks beforehand. “No other mainstream white journalist in America’s second largest city was writing anything close to Sandburg’s depth about its festering racial problems,” McWhirter has written.
It may be Sandburg’s roots as an Elmhurst resident that led the students of government classes there, at York High School, to study the riots and partner with the Chicago Park District to mount the commemorative plaque.
A fuller and, Chicago 1919 organizers hope, more far reaching reckoning will come with the events of 2019. Young Chicago Authors will treat 1919 in live performance poetry in August. Kartemquin Films will show “’63 Boycott” in June. Startup news organization City Bureau in April will lead a discussion called “Reporting on Race” dealing with Sandburg’s work and that of the Chicago Defender up to contemporary journalism. Among other experts appearing at the year’s events are Charles Whitaker, interim dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and Lisa Yun Lee, executive director of Chicago’s National Public Housing Museum.
“This was super necessary,” said Balto. “When people walk thorough the Loop they probably don’t think about black people being beaten to death on the streets of the Loop during this riot.”
They probably don’t realize, he said, that “after the riot there’s a sort of general understanding from a number of black South Siders that they’re kind of on their own. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of institution building on the black South Side in the 1920s follows the riots.”
But it was a bittersweet independence. “The riots served for decades afterward,” Balto said, “as a reminder of the truncated promise of a place like Chicago.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
