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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.
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 47th 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.
Rumor and Escalation
The pattern of rumor fueling violence continued on Tuesday, July 29, when a rumor swept the Black Belt that a mob of thousands of whites was mobilized just a few blocks away getting ready to “clean up” the Black Belt. This was followed by rumors of a black woman murdered by whites, and a rumor that a white tenant had fired a shot from the Angelus apartment house, wounding a black boy.
No one actually saw or heard the shot, but the police cooperated with the angry black citizens by conducting a search of the apartment the shot supposedly came from. When they didn’t find anything, a mob massed near where a large contingent of officers were stationed. When one member of the mob threw a brick at the policemen, the police opened fire and the crowd fired back. Four black men were killed in the firefight.
White mobs grew in size throughout the evening, with men and boys roaming the South Side and attacking any black on sight. One black war veteran, his wife, and another married couple were set upon while returning from a restaurant. The veteran was beaten and shot, but despite the wound he succeeded in sticking a knife into the chest of his assailant, who was left to die when the rest of the mob fled.
Also that Tuesday the traction workers went on strike, cutting off train travel in the city. Blacks would now have to walk to work, raising new possibilities for violence as they crossed out of the Black Belt into enemy territory. For most the choice was clear, and so the next morning only 19 of 1,500 black stockyard employees showed up. Chicago, “hog butcher for the world,” wasn’t butchering any hogs today.
Violence spread to the Loop as a mob stocked with soldiers and sailors decided to patrol the downtown for blacks, dragging any unfortunates they caught from restaurants or hotels to be beaten in the streets.
Still more rumors spread, most exaggerating the real scale of violence and destruction and motivating further vengeance. Newspapers were no more critical than the man in the street, and published grossly exaggerated casualty counts and false claims of attacks on white women.
Violence spilled over into other areas. On the West Side, members of the Italian enclave set upon and killed a black youth riding a bicycle by their neighborhood. The killing was revenge for the alleged killing of a white girl. On North Side, a crowd of nearly 5,000 whites hunted for blacks in the streets. But on the South Side, now in darkness with all the streetlamps broken, most people stuck close to home.
Government Response
One characteristic the Chicago riot shares with other incidents of rioting and mob violence is the ineffectiveness of law enforcement. As the author puts it:
“The undermanned police force was an ineffectual deterrent to the waves of violence which soon overflowed the environs of the black belt and flooded the North and West Sides of the Loop, Chicago’s downtown business district. Only several regiments of state’s militiamen and a cooling rain finally quenched the passions of the rioters, and even then sporadic outbursts punctuated the atmosphere for another week.”
The leadership of the Chicago did make some attempts at keeping order. But a lot of factors were stacked against this working.
Obviously, many officers would have shared the same anti-black prejudice that animated the rioters, and they were sometimes much more brutal toward blacks than toward white rioters.
Even if they didn’t start out with much personal prejudice, incidents like the firefight with black citizens near the Angelus apartment building surely didn’t help either side have much trust in the other. Indeed, at times this riot looks like a kind of estuary between the anti-black pogroms of that era and the anti-police ghetto riots that would shake the nation a generation later.
There was also the fact many of the officers had teenaged children who were members of the youth gangs leading the violence, and that these gangs had ties to the same political machine that no doubt helped many of the officers get their positions. And for some, a degree of passive collusion with the rioters — disappearing down a side alley when a white mob appeared on the street — was probably just craven self-preservation.
When police did intervene in a mob attack on a black person, their solution was usually to arrest the black person. This was nominally for his own safety. And it does make sense that it would be safer to defuse things by getting the would-be victim off the street than by risking an open battle with an angry mob. One can find many cases of Southern lynch mobs thwarted when the police spirited their target away to a safer location.
But it’s worth pointing out that these black people they arrested often wound up getting charged, to the point that later even white judges and grand juries would complain that all the alleged rioters brought before them were black — surely, officers, there were some white people involved in this race war?
Even if police were unwilling or unable to suppress the riots, the state militia certainly was, and this is what eventually happened. The question is why the militia weren’t called in far sooner. By the third day of rioting police and aldermen were begging for the state militia to enter the city. The city’s black leaders had reason to fear state militia — in the East St. Louis Massacre two years prior, they had sided with the rioters — but as the riot dragged on, they requested their intervention as well.
A big part of the reason for the delay, and thus for why the riot dragged on as long as it did, was the political rivalry between Mayor William Thompson and Governor Frank O. Lowden. The two men had once been political allies but had had a major falling out. This likely contributed to Mayor Thompson’s stubborn refusal to request help from the Governor, and the Governor’s stubborn refusal to send in the state militia without the Mayor first explicitly asking him for it.
It thus seems likely that dozens of people died and the city remained in chaos because of a petty political grudge. So it goes.
The Red Summer
The Chicago riot was one of many riots that took place during that infamous Red Summer of 1919, during which hundreds died in lynchings, race riots, and massacres. Describing the larger wave of mob violence, Tuttle writes:
“Lynch mobs murdered seventy-eight black people in 1919, an increase of fifteen over 1918 and thirty over 1917….the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had expressed shock in 1918 when lynch mobs had murdered two black men by fire; in 1919, eleven men were burned alive at the stake”
During the Red Summer lynchings — in which mobs focused on one or a few accused criminals — were mostly confined to the South. Riots, in which mobs attack whole neighborhoods indiscriminately, were more evenly distributed, with about half occurring in Northern and Border states.
This summer saw the first major riot in Charleston, South Carolina. On Saturday, May 10, a black man got into an argument with a white sailor and soon blacks and sailors were brawling throughout the town. There were hundreds of sailors in town on liberties, and hearing of a racial fight they swarmed into the black district, armed with rifles, clubs, and hammers. The city officials couldn’t subdue them and asked the Navy for help. Marines with fixed bayonets finally restored order.
In Washington, DC, that July four women were allegedly assaulted by black rapists in Washington, and three more in nearby parts of Maryland. The press played up the lurid details. On July 20, the night after The Washington Post ran a story “NEGROES ATTACK GIRL…WHITE MEN VAINLY PURSUE,” bands of soldiers, sailors, and Marines began attacking any black person in sight. After three days of rioting, some blacks retaliated, and whites threatened to burn their homes. The Post continued to inflame the rioters with its coverage.
Tuttle tries to connect the Red Summer to the anti-communist Red Scare that also took place that year. I remain to be convinced. Maybe the two things shared some underlying causes — the sort of destabilizing social trends scholars like Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin credit for cycles of rebellion and instability. But to me it doesn’t pass the smell test to argue that worries about communism were a big driving force in violence against blacks. If anything, the Chicago riot was driven by unionists who saw blacks as a race of scab workers in the service of capital.
But speaking of large-scale causes of instability, Tuttle addresses one big factor that led to the Red Summer in general and the Chicago Riot in particular: World War I.
The war had led to a massive boom in the economy as US companies supplied allies in Europe with needed goods. And when America waded into the war as well, millions of working-age men were siphoned off into the war effort. The result of both trends was a high demand for workers. Black workers left the farms in droves to work in industrial centers.
Only in 1919 the war was over, demand was down, and millions of soldiers were getting demobilized and heading back into the labor market. As Tuttle writes:
“Unemployment rose sharply in April and May, and with it the nation’s industrial unrest. As a consequence, the United States suffered one of its worst years of labor strife since the 1890s….the 181 strikes and lockouts in March soared to 262 in April and 413 in May…”
The resulting labor market competition often became racial conflict, as blacks and whites competed for the same jobs and found themselves on different sides of the picket line during labor disputes.
There’s also the fact that with military demobilization ongoing, many parts of the country had large populations of soldiers and sailors about. These men took a lead in the rioting in Charleston and Washington, and eventually joined in the Chicago riot. Here again, solidary groups of young men play an important role in collective violence.
Zooming in on Chicago in particular, Tuttle outlines five interrelated factors that caused the race riot: The Great Migration, labor conflict, residential conflict, political conflict, and changing black attitudes.
The Great Migration
The Great Migration was the mass movement of blacks from the farms of the South into Northern industrial centers. The sudden influx of black migrants into Northern cities sharpened job competition, led to blacks moving into formerly homogeneously white neighborhoods, increased the social distance between the typical white and the typical black, and led to increased opportunities for negative interactions.
The Migration took off in 1916, and the scale was enormous:
“Chicago’s black population practically doubled in the next four years. The school census of May 1914 counted 54,557 black people….by 1920, according to the federal census, the number of blacks in Chicago had soared to 110,000, and the vast preponderance of this increase was made up with migrants who had been Southern and to a large extent rural up to World War I.”
Migrants were encouraged by publications like the Chicago Defender, which was widely read in the South and boasted of the North’s relative freedom and opportunity. And they were actively recruited by Northern industry. Some recruiters and labor agents helped blacks sneak away from the plantations on which they lived as sharecroppers, perpetually indebted to the landlord and largely forbidden from leaving the land without permission. A government agency, the United States Employment Service, also facilitated migration until Southerners objected.
Migrant blacks took jobs in forging, machine shops, and especially in the slaughter and packing houses.
Southern blacks were mostly rural, used to virtual serfdom and Jim Crow laws, and culturally distant from both Northern whites and Northern blacks. Some Northern blacks complained that the arrival of the Southern blacks, with their embarrassingly coarse ways, had increased white prejudice against blacks in general. They thought race relations were better before and the Southerners “made it hard for all of us.” One black woman claimed that “her children used to attend ‘the white kids’ parties’ and “the white children and colored children got along fine.”
Migrants for their part sometimes thought the Northern blacks were “acting like white.”
Churches and other social services, such as the Chicago Urban League, sought to provide for and integrate the migrants. The push to integrate and assimilate Southern blacks wasn’t entirely altruistic: Black community leaders were very aware that all would be collectively judged by the worst among them. The League’s secretary explained in a letter that “general behavior, good manners, good conduct, and attention to dress and cleanliness” were important for the black community, while The Defender too wrote that whites would see undesirable behavior as racial traits and not individual ones.
Note that one sees similar warnings about the effects of the Springfield vice district in the run-up to the Springfield Race Riot, with black leaders warning — quite presciently — of the collective liability to come.
The Irish
Among white ethnic groups, the Polish and Irish were the most hostile to blacks. Tuttle writes that the Irish antagonism in the US is “legendary” due to “opposing political affiliations and competition in the labor market.” One can see it in other race riots from the 19th century onward, including in the Springfield riot of 1908 where, as Senechal del la Roche found, Irish were overrepresented among named rioters. And one can see it in Chicago from as early as the Civil War, when blacks and Irish fought battles in Chicago.
In one 1865 incident:
“A dozen blacks underbid Irish longshoremen for the job of unloading a lumber boat. Five hundred Irish workers retaliated by attacking and forcing them to flee the docks for their lives. ‘It was degrading,’ the Irish said in their defense, ‘to see blacks working upon an equality with themselves, and more so, while their brothers were out of employment.’”
It didn’t help that in Chicago, as in several other cities, the black and Irish neighborhoods butted up against one another. In Chicago they were separated only by Wentworth Avenue, a boundary patrolled by Irish and black youth gangs. Add to that that thousands of blacks had to cross this boundary every weekday to get to their jobs in the Union Stock yard, and you have a recipe for frequent violent encounters.
Segregation and Respectability
Even as the number of blacks swelled, the races remained largely segregated and relationally distant. Many black children lived in the predominately Irish school district, but fearing the Irish kids their parents requested their kids be transferred to black schools instead.
Most whites only had contact with blacks in situations like rush-hour streetcars and trains, where they would see dirty and smelly men coming home from the stockyards. Their indirect contact took the form of reading stories of black crime and vice in the newspapers. Tuttle talks about how the newspapers played up some of these cases, having fun with buffoonish black stereotypes.
He doesn’t get into it, but the crime problem was likely quite real, and was probably exacerbated by the demographics of the Great Migration. Migrants tended to be young single men, full of beans and uprooted from their old lives, and prone to all the sort of aggressive competitiveness and risk-taking that so often leads to crime.
On the other hand, once the riot did break out, this surplus of “fighting age” men might also have helped prevent the black neighborhoods from being overrun.
Unions and Racial Conflict
Race conflict in Chicago was tightly bound up with labor conflict. Job competition had bred violence since the closing days of the Civil War.
In 1894, packing and slaughterhouse workers struck in support of the Railway Union, and the companies first hired black strikebreakers who worked, ate, and slept at the stockyards. There were sporadic attacks on blacks, and a black dummy was hanged in effigy. When the strike failed, the black strikebreakers were blamed.
Elsewhere in Illinois during the 1890s labor conflict turned into racial violence as employers employed blacks to break strikes. Businesses specifically recruited Southern blacks for this purpose. The led to things like, for example, striking Italian miners attempting to purge blacks from their town during the Spring Valley Race Riot of 1895.
For their part, blacks were excluded from unions during this time, no matter how skilled they were. The unions essentially forced them to be scabs and blamed them for it.
In Chicago, workers unions grew in the meat industry, and with their growth the scale of labor conflict increased. In 1904, 23,000 packing house workers went on strike, joined later by 7,000 mechanical tradesman.
The strike was probably doomed from the beginning. Union solidarity was undercut by ethnic diversity of white immigrant groups. And there was an ongoing depression producing long lines of men looking for work. But much of the blame for the strike’s eventual failure fell on black strikebreakers.
“One observer estimated that upwards of 18,000 blacks served as strikebreakers with almost 1,400 of them arriving in one trainload. Although these figures probably were exaggerated, to white workers the disturbing presence of the blacks seemed to be everywhere.”
One night during the strike a journalist snuck into the stockyards where black workers were being housed. He later wrote a scathing report describing thousands of blacks living in squalid conditions and engaging in various bad behaviors like gambling and knife fighting.
Believing the violence of the 1894 strike turned public opinion against them, union leaders urged nonviolence. But violence erupted nonetheless:
“A mob of 500 mauled a black laborer and his ten-year-old son, and in another skirmish white strikers stabbed both eyes of a black strikebreaker. Other black people were hauled off streetcars. A full-scale riot threatened to erupt when 2,000 angry strikers hurled brickbats and other missiles at 200 black strikebreakers and their police escorts…and in late August union pickets fatally stabbed a black suspected of strikebreaking.”
By this point “The words ‘Nego’ and ‘scab’ were now synonymous in the minds of numerous white stockyards workers,” something played up and exploited by politicians seeking to win union support.
The impression of blacks as a “scab race” was solidified by another strike the next year. The teamster’s strike lasted 100 days and resulted in 20 deaths and 400 serious injuries. Soon after the strike began, “trainloads of black men began streaming into Chicago. Shootings, knifings, and stonings soon paralyzed the city’s commerce. Showers of bricks and stones greeted the black drivers as they attempted to deliver milk, coal, and other merchandise.”
In the previous strike union hostility was mostly limited to the black strikebreakers themselves. In the 1905 strike, liability extended to blacks in general, so that “any black man was a potential target." Racial violence spread throughout the city but was especially bad in the blue-collar neighborhood west of the black belt. Victims included a black medical student and even a black union worker who was assaulted despite protesting he was a union man.
Likewise, labor solidarity and partisanship toward the strikers spread out into the white community. Grade school students struck in solidarity with the workers, often supported by their parents and teachers. When a coal company sent black drivers to deliver coal, students pelted them with pieces of coal and a school principal said he would invite the pupils to strike rather than suffer black deliverymen.
Black strikebreakers were sometimes violent as well. When a group of white children jeered them, two black strikebreakers working for a coal company fired into the crowd, killing an 11-year-old boy. Four days later,
“Rioting surged out of control. Whites, parading down the streets proclaiming their intention of ‘driving the blacks off the face of the earth,’ met with armed resistance. Surrounded by attackers, another strikebreaker from Peabody fired and fatally wounded a white man. The next day, as the rioting spread to other districts, police were unable to prevent the outbreaks and disturbances that grew bloodier as night approached. That evening a black man was murdered by a white bartender in a saloon brawl, and other black men were dragged off streetcars. In the black belt, where blacks marched the streets crying ‘Justice’ and ‘Down with the white trash,’ white men were chased and beaten.”
Then came World War I. Starting in 1914 there was a spike in demand for goods and for labor. Union leaders took the opportunity for a big push to expand their unions and make harder demands of employers. This only accelerated when America’s entry into the war diverted manpower as well.
Meanwhile, the Great Migration made it clear to Chicago union leaders that they needed to unionize black workers before the war ended. At that point the demobilization of 4 million servicemen, plus the large population of newly arrived blacks, would make the supply of workers high enough that management could have its pick and the unions would be bent over a barrel.
Chicago union leaders attempted to get blacks into their unions but were hamstrung by two problems. The first was that even if the local chapters were willing to have black members, there were national rules forbidding this. Thus, the best they could offer was the much less attractive status of an affiliate, which did not carry the same benefits.
The second problem was that by this point blacks by and large didn’t want to be in the unions. After decades of being excluded from unions, and only getting labor opportunities by being willing to work nonunion, blacks habitually viewed unions more as an enemy or obstacle than as an ally. It took a lot of effort to convince them otherwise, and the effort was undercut by the inability to grant them full membership, and also by hostility and conflict between white and black workers.
Cultural distance between immigrant union leaders and blacks also contributed. Some Polish union leaders mostly communicated in their native language, which worked fine for fellow immigrants but left them unable to talk to black Americans.
Organized labor was especially an alien concept to the recent black migrants from the South. By the time of the riot, 90 percent of Northern-born black workers in the stockyards were union men, but hardly any of the Southern migrants were. The Southerners carried with them the cultural pattern of a patron-client relationship with their employer — they were used to depending on the plantation owner or other prominent whites for protection and assistance. And for many of these migrants, the companies did indeed provide them with more goods and services than the unions would.
Labor conflict flared up again in 1919, with a violent strike resulting in worker deaths in nearby Argo. By July 1919, “upwards of 250,000 workers in Chicago were on strike, threatening to strike, or locked out” of their workplaces, such that “one out of every three or four men and women in wage-earning fields in which there was the slightest union activity was a participant in a labor dispute.” And at this time, “90 per cent of the whites in the stockyards were unionized, while three fourths of the black workers, or 9,000 people, were still outside of the labor movement.”
Residential Conflict and Contested Neighborhoods
Another source of conflict had to do with who lived where. As migration increased, the black population began to spill out of the black belt. White homeowners’ associations sprang up to deal with the grievance of black people moving into their “contested” neighborhoods. A major one was the Community Property Owners’ Protective Association which had the goal of “keeping ‘undesirables’ out.”
One result of this conflict was a spate of bombings:
“From July 1917 to…July 1919, no fewer than twenty-six bombs were exploded at isolated black residences in once all-white neighborhoods and at the offices of certain realtors who had sold to blacks. Over half of these bombs were exploded during the tense six-months leading up to the riot.”
Yes, there was a terrorist bombing campaign in Chicago in the nineteen-teens.
There’s a circumstantial case that the Hyde Park-Kentwood Association conspired to commit some of these bombings, and at any rate the bombings occurred after association meetings denouncing blacks. The denunciations became more vitriolic going into summer of 1919.
Political Conflict
Yet another cause of the racial conflict was political.
The growth in the black population made them a more powerful voting bloc, and politicians tried to take advantage by courting the black vote. The black voters were powerful enough to swing a mayoral election. Mayor Bill Thompson won office by aggressively courting the black vote, something that his critics added to their list of grievances.
Notably, Thompsons polled only 18 percent among the Irish, but 73 percent among blacks, putting the two ethnic groups on opposite political sides as well as in competition over labor and housing.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Irish gang most active in violence against Chicago blacks was itself part of the political landscape. The Ragen Colts took their name from Cook County Commissioner Frank Ragen, “who paid the rent on the clubhouse and made financial donations to their other enterprises.” These included various sports events and recreation activities, as well as political intimidation. In addition to family ties to the police, the gang had political protection as part of the local Democratic machine.
New Black Attitudes
A final cause of conflict that Tuttle identifies is changing black attitudes and behaviors, especially a growing tendency to demand equal treatment. Like the effects of the war-fueled economic boom and bust, this might have been a general cause of the violence of the Red Summer.
Going into this period we see W.E.B. Dubois leading the rise of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (itself founded in reaction to the Springfield riot of 1908). Dubois explicitly called for a pivot away from Booker T. Washington’s strategy of patience, accommodation, and black self-improvement to a strategy of blacks clearly and loudly demanding their rights.
Black confidence and assertiveness were also fueled by World War I. This was partly because of the flood of government propaganda about the importance of freedom and democracy, and partly because of the participation of black men in the US armed forces. Not only did these men gain military training and experience, but while serving in France they experienced better treatment by the French, sometimes compounded with unfair treatment by their own American officers.
The growth of Northern black communities during the Great Migration coincided with a strengthening of black identity, and also with seeing whites in general as an outgroup, a race of oppressors. Indeed, Tuttle says it was the period leading up to the Red Summer that one first sees broad anti-white rhetoric in black publications.
A more generalized hostility to white society went along with a growing belief that even in Northern cities the law could not be trusted for protection. Hostility to the police was growing as well, with headlines in the black press talking of innocent blacks “beaten up by Irish officers.” And the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917, in which state forces joined in with rioters, certainly convinced some that black people could only rely on self-defense.
If the Chicago riot was less one-sided than some others, it is partly because everyone knew a big conflict was brewing, and black residents were preparing to rely on their own devices.
For as World War I wound on, violent conflicts in Chicago increased. Though stopping short of full scale riot, there were gang attacks on isolated black targets, an incident in which the police shot a black man fleeing a white mob, a battle between black and white gangs in Washington park that turned into fatal attacks on bystanders, a fight on a crowded streetcar that led to a black man beaten in the street while his brother shot and wounded several white pursuers. And, of course, there was also the bombing campaign in contested neighborhoods.
One can’t say the big earthquake wasn’t preceded by warning tremors. Flyers appeared in black neighborhoods warning of impending attacks, and a black pastor told his parishioners “Be ye also ready” and to “arm their homes.” It’s likely some took the advice.
Thanks for reading!