Books: Race Riot

Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919

Wherever you’re reading this, I appreciate your interest. If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole you can leave a tip at this Stripe link or with Paypal. If you’re not already one, you can become a free or paid subscriber at the link below.

In 1919 Chicago, race conflict had been simmering for a while. During a heatwave that July it finally boiled over.  

Five black teenagers went down to a stretch of beach along Lake Michigan, a quiet spot between the customarily whites-only beach and the blacks-only beach. The boys couldn’t exactly swim, but they had a raft and would paddle out into the lake to cool off.

Meanwhile, three streets over, violent conflict erupted when a group of black men and women tried to break custom and attend the whites-only beach. They were chased off with curses and thrown rocks, only to return with supporters and throw rocks of their own. The cycle repeated itself, as the white beachgoers ran off and returned with their own supporters to throw more rocks at the blacks.

This is probably why, back at their mostly empty beach, the five swimming boys saw a white man walk out on the breakwater and start throwing stones at them. A heavy rock caught Eugene Williams in the head, knocking him unconscious. He let go of the raft and sank to his death.  

A half-hour later divers recovered Eugene’s body. The boys talked to a black policeman, and together with him they went to an Irish policeman and pointed out the man they said threw the rocks.

The white officer refused to arrest the suspect and would not let the black officer arrest him either. The two policemen argued, and the boys ran to tell “the colored people what was happening.” Soon a crowd of black people rushed to the scene.

The growing crowd of blacks demanded the police arrest the accused, and the Irish officer continued to refuse. Then, in view of the angry crowd, a white man came to complain to the officer about a black man, whom the officer promptly arrested.

Meanwhile, there were exaggerated rumors of the incident spreading through the black areas of the city. It wasn’t just one man who had thrown the fatal rocks at the boys — no, it was a whole crowd of white people throwing stones and bricks.  And the white officer not only refused to arrest the killer but had been there during the killing. Soon the rumor had him helping with the killing by holding black bystanders at gunpoint so they couldn’t swim out to save the drowning boy.

Hundreds of angry black Chicagoans headed down to the beach. When a police van pulled up to cart off the arrested black man, the black crowd hurled bricks and rocks. Then one black man pulled a revolver and fired into a cluster of policemen, wounding one of them. An officer — a black officer — returned fire, killing the man. Others in the crowd went for their weapons, and a gun battle began.

After years of brushfire conflicts, Chicago was finally in the throes of a race war.

The Nature of the Violence

Historian William M. Tuttle’s use of term “race war” to describe the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 is a bit overdramatic. But it does highlight two major aspects of the violence.

One is that the riot was a large-scale event — after kicking off on Sunday, July 27, it lasted five more days, killing 38 and injuring over 500.

The other is that the violence was less one-sided than in some of the era’s other big race riots. For example, in the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, there were only sporadic and isolated acts of resistance from the black population, and the rioters were able to smash or burn most of the city’s black business and black homes. This was not the case in Chicago, where the black neighborhoods were successfully defended, and black mobs sometimes attacked whites and police in retaliation.

Rather than invasion and destruction, much of the violence in Chicago consisted of brief sorties into enemy territory, with street patrols on both sides attacking any person of the wrong color foolish or unlucky enough to wind up on their turf. Per Tuttle:

“Day and night white toughs assaulted isolated blacks, and teenage black mobsters beat white peddlers and merchants in the black belt….White gunmen in automobiles sped through the black belt shooting indiscriminately as they passed, and black snipers fired back.”

Collective violence is more likely where you already have solidary groups primed for collective action. And it helps if they’re groups of young men. In Chicago, the city’s youth gangs — euphemistically known as “athletic clubs” — played an important part in the violence. Local gangs included the Hamburgers, the Dirty Dozen, Our Flag, the Sparklers, and the Standard, but the group at the forefront of the riot was the Irish gang the Ragen Colts. Most of the 27 black people beaten on the first night of violence fell victim to the Colts.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations later that if not for the gangs, the riot would likely have not gotten off the ground.

Other than the pioneering examples of drive-by shooting, most white attackers fought with traditional gang implements such as knives, bats, bricks, and fists. Blacks, who were more often on the defense, were more apt to use firearms as well as knives.

Rioters stone a black man.

With both blacks and whites patrolling their neighborhoods for people of the wrong color, one might think it was relatively easy to avoid the violence by staying home. But the need to make a living forced some people into harm’s way. Those who lived in Chicago’s Black Belt generally had to travel through white neighborhoods on their way to work, and some were injured or killed while attempting to do so. Tuttle gives one example:

“Returning at six o’clock from the stockyards to the black belt, John Mills had boarded an eastbound streetcar on 47^th Street. Just a few blocks later, the car suddenly slammed to a halt as a mob of fifty white youths rushed into the street to surround it. One of the leaders had already climbed atop and disengaged the trolley pole; and as so often happened with the city’s mobs during those days of race rioting, about 400 whites, including boys and girls four and five years old, lined the sides of the street cheering on the active nucleus of teenagers. Mills and five other black men, knowing beyond all doubt that they were the hated objects of this assault, leaped from the car and began to run. The hard core of the mob, trailed now by nearly 2,000 enthusiastic onlookers, gave chase. Mills was tackled by his assailants and pummeled to death, his skull fractured.”

Black mobs also attacked people whose business brought them into the wrong neighborhood. Like the white mobs, they employed collective liability, attacking any member of the enemy group regardless of his own conduct.

For instance, on Monday, July 28th, the second day of the riot, about 4,000 blacks gathered at an intersection. As they passed about a rumor that an invasion of their neighborhood was coming, sixty-year-old peddler Casmero Lazeroni steered his horse-drawn wagon onto the next street over. The mob spotted him and attacked. They threw stones at him, dragged him from his car, and stabbed him to death.

Later that night black mobs also murdered a white laundryman and a white shoemaker. Meanwhile, black students and war veterans stood guard around the Wabash Avenue YMCA, returning fire as carloads of whites did sporadic drive-by shootings.