This week marked the 105th anniversary of the deadliest race riot in the nation’s history—the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. The tumult was born from a simmering stew of racial resentment caused by the steady migration of African Americans from southern cities into the northern “Promised Land.”
Between 1910 and 1920, over 50,000 Black migrants moved to Chicago. This grew the city’s African American population a purported 148 percent in ten years. Crowded into the city’s so-called Black Belt, a corridor of blocks along State Street, extending from 22nd to 31st Streets and later stretching from 39th to 95th Streets, between the Dan Ryan Expressway and Lake Michigan, many suffered resentment and resistance as they sought an escape from economic exploitation, subjugation and hostility in the South.
But for many, the northern “Promised Land” championed by Black leaders had turned into another form of hell. Though the city was founded by a Black explorer, new arrivals found the City of Big Shoulders shrouded in an unwelcoming, anti-Black spirit. Families and solo arrivals were crammed into dilapidated properties owned by white and immigrant landlords and required to pay steep rents.
African Americans who could afford better living conditions faced harassment, abuse, and possible death if they crossed the invisible color lines established by whites throughout Chicago. It was unrealistic to believe a doubled Black population could fit into the cramped “Black Belt.”
White citizens did not care. Instead of finding burning crosses on their front lawns, some Black families found their entire homes engulfed in flames—a clear message from their white neighbors to get out and stay out of their communities. In a two-year period more than 24 bombings of properties housing Black residents had been reported to Chicago authorities. Youth attempting to play in local parks were often chased, beaten or robbed by white and immigrant gangs, or harassed and unjustly jailed by law enforcement. Young men and women, the most skilled laborers in the nation, were now unable to find steady work that paid a living wage.
Following World War I, millions of military personnel were discharged and returned home, including 200,000 Black people who served in various capacities. Racial tensions soon escalated due to increased competition in the job and housing markets between ethnic, European Americans and African Americans throughout the country. In Chicago, Black veterans and other new arrivals sought employment in the stockyards and slaughterhouses but were met with hostility, work stoppages and violent resistance by white and unionized workers.
African Americans in other parts of Illinois fared no better. In August 1908, a two-day race riot broke out in Springfield. A mob of 5,000 white males inflicted death and damage on Black citizens in response to a rumor of an alleged rape of a white woman. In July 1917, East St. Louis was the site of another violent outbreak after whites rebelled against Black veterans employed at a federally funded factory. For four days, Caucasians indiscriminately attacked Black citizens, stabbing, clubbing, and hanging them. Over 6,000 people were displaced, and 40 Blacks and eight whites were killed. The incident led to a rare denunciation by President Woodrow Wilson and a congressional hearing.
Despite these persistent racial tensions, Black Chicagoans continued to expand and grow vibrant communities, cultural institutions, businesses, churches and social clubs, and amass political power. Black newspapers heralded the ongoing expansion of the industrial revolution and continue to encourage Black southerners to head north. Native born residents welcomed those travelling the routes of the Great Black Migration but also pressed upon their civil rights organizations to provide economic relief for their impoverished kinship.
Desperation had begun to kick in. Some young adults had turned to crime, vice and other underground economies to support themselves and their families.
Many African Americans looked to leaders such as Oscar DePriest, who in 1905 became the first Black person to serve on the Cook County Board and the first Black Chicago City Council member in 1915, representing the 2nd Ward. His constituency grew. The city’s African American population increased from roughly 45,000 in 1909 to more than 109,000 in less than a decade. White citizens openly complained to their political leaders that the newcomers would disrupt their way of life, take away their jobs, engage in crime and lower their property values. This new “migrant crisis” had caused anxiety on both sides.
A skilled negotiator, DePriest convinced Mayor William Hale Thompson to rectify this growing problem by extending additional social services to new arrivals, whites protested and took out their frustrations on Black citizens, regardless of age, gender–or if they were a southern migrant or not. The robust Black Press, led by Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender carried numerous headlines about discrimination, bias, crime and other racial sleights, further angering Black citizens locally and across the country.
The NAACP took active measures to reduce hostility and seek justice for the aggrieved. The Chicago Urban League, founded in 1916, worked to reduce the illiteracy rate among Black migrants, and assist them with finding steady work and safe and affordable housing. Quinn Chapel AME and Olivet Baptist Church experienced large increases in their congregations, with the former recording over 10,000 members.
However less than 24 months into DePriest’s historic aldermanic term, the city was hit by a tornado of racial chaos, death and destruction. Chicago had entered an epoch.
On Sunday, July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old porter who, according to researchers, lived at 3921 S. Prairie, went swimming with four friends at the segregated 25th Street beach. Unbeknown to him and his friends they had drifted across Lake Michigan’s invisible color line and floated into waters near the whites-only 29th Street beach. George Stauber, a 24-year-old white man, took offense to the Black teens’ presence and threw stones at Williams resulting in the boy’s drowning. Black beachgoers who witnessed the murder confronted the guilty parties and demanded a Chicago police officer arrest those responsible, but he refused. What happened next remains in some dispute. But some accounts say a group of whites enraged by what was happening launched into an attack. In self-defense, Black beachgoers retaliated and news of the ongoing incident spread.
Within 120 minutes of Williams’ stoning death, the nation’s deadliest race riot had awakened, and a second Black life was soon claimed.
Within 24 hours of the inciting incident, the number of Blacks reporting injury and assault quadrupled from 31 to 152. Provident Hospital, established in 1891 by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams as the nation’s first Black-owned hospital in the nation, became overwhelmed with the victims of mob violence. More than 537 people in total were seriously injured—342 of whom were African American. The riot ended 38 lives—23 Black men and 15 White men.
One such victim was Paul Hardwick, who was shot to death on the morning of Tuesday, July 29th by a group of whites while eating in a restaurant. An official accounting of the 5:00 a.m. incident said: “A mob of white civilians, soldiers, and sailors, who had been chasing Negroes through the “Loop ” district for the previous two or three hours, beating and robbing them, and destroying property where Negroes were not found, entered one of Thompson’s restaurants where Hardwick was breakfasting [sic].
“Another Negro… was also in the restaurant. The mob set upon them, throwing food and dishes. Hardwick dodged into the street and King hid behind a dish counter, where he was wounded with a knife,” the report continued. “Failing to catch Hardwick as he fled down Adams Street, one of the rioters stepped to the curb and fired a revolver at him, bringing him down. Several of the crowd robbed the corpse. At the time of the coroner’s jury hearing the only one of the mob identified was Ray Freedman, aged seventeen. He was apprehended and charged with murder, malicious mischief, and inciting to riot, but was not indicted. Later Edward Haines was connected with the case, indicted, and on February 21, 1920, sent to Pontiac.”
Another Black man, Robert Williams, was also killed July 29 at 6:15 a.m. near State and Van Buren. The official account read: “The murder of Williams was the second riot killing in the heart of Chicago’s business district on the morning of July 29. Before Williams died, he said he had been assaulted by white men at State and Van Buren streets. An eyewitness, a Negro, said he saw Williams running west on the car track on Van Buren Street, followed by a mob of about 200 white men. One of them, whom he positively identified as Frank Biga, stabbed the deceased twice, but Williams continued to run for a distance after that.
“A white man who saw Williams picked up at Harrison and State streets also identified Biga as a man who all during the morning had led gangs chasing Negroes. A woman went to a policeman and pointed out Biga as the leader of riot mobs,” the report noted. “The coroner’s jury recommended that Biga be held to the grand jury upon a charge of murder. At the time of the identification of Biga by the woman the policeman arrested him, found a broken razor in his possession, and had him booked for disorderly conduct, for which he was fined $5 and costs in the boys’ court and sent to the House of Correction. The next day he broke out of the House of Correction and was not again apprehended until he was implicated in the murder of a shoe merchant, Fred Bender, on August 8, 1919. He killed Bender with a blow on the head from an iron pipe. On February 18, 1920, Biga was sent to the penitentiary for life.”
Three days after the riot began, the governor deployed a state militia to assist local police in restoring order. Ex-soldiers, sheriff’s deputies and others also volunteered. Ten days later after Williams’ tragic death, on August 6th, officials finally declared the rampage was over and that Chicago would return to a sense of normalcy.
But, for many Blacks their lives had been forever altered. The South Side had been devastated. Loved ones, neighbors and friends had been killed or maimed. Homes, businesses and churches had been destroyed. People immediately became destitute. Children and elders were traumatized. And now there were many new clarion calls that encouraged African Americans to return to the South.
Others swung into action. Jesse Binga, founder and president of the Black-owned Binga Bank, set out to restore Black homes by giving interest free loans to African American families and church leaders. More than 1,000 residences had been destroyed by arson, vandalism or shotgun blasts. White real estate interests rallied against the activist banker and launched a campaign to decertify his bank and land him in prison for alleged fraud.
Standing churches, missionary and mutual aid societies sought to stabilize predominantly Black communities with food, clothing, urgent care and temporary shelter, while demanding city, state and federal resources. African American rights groups used the momentum to demand federal civil rights protections and the passage of anti-lynching laws.
In 1922 the Chicago Commission on Race Relations published its long-awaited report entitled, “The Negro in Chicago.” Its forward was authored by then-Governor Frank Lowden. “There is no domestic problem in America which has given thoughtful men more concern than the problem of the relations between the white and the Negro races,” the governor wrote. “In earlier days the colonization of the Negro, as in Liberia, was put forward as a solution. That idea was abandoned long ago. It is now recognized generally that the two races are here in America to stay.”
The 600-plus page study, commissioned just two months after the 1919 riot, examined the life of Blacks in the city, and documented the extensive racial violence, systemic racism, and chronicled the institutional and socio-political barriers they faced. The report also revealed the numerous growing tensions that led up to the city’s Red Summer, noting there were at least 17 other major “racial clashes” that proceeded the horrific event.
In February 1917 a group of white boys between the ages of 12 and 16 stoned a four-flat building at 456 W. 46th Street after two Black families moved into two, second-floor units. The following day more than 100 white boys from a nearby school, returned to the dwelling and commenced rock throwing, breaking windows and doing extensive damage to the building. When the families attempted to flee, they were driven back inside until the miscreants tired of their harassment or took breaks. Police eventually rescued the residents, and they quickly relocated elsewhere.
On July 3rd of that same year, a white man by the name of Charles A. Maronde, was found dead at 5161 S. State Street and Blacks were thought to have been responsible for his death. The tavern owner had routinely attacked African Americans who walked through or near his segregated business and his hatred for them was well-known among his white patrons. Instead of waiting for answers, white men started another nighttime race riot when they did a drive-by on a car filled with a Black family near 53rd and Federal. Unrest followed. Later the coroner found that the man had died of heart disease, the report noted.
Among scores of other incidents, the Commission expressed frustration with proposed solutions to the city’s “race problem.” It said, “Countless schemes have been proposed for solving or dismissing this problem, most of them impracticable or impossible. Of this class are such proposals as: (1) the deportation of 12,000,000 Negroes to Africa; (2) the establishment of a separate Negro state in the United States; (3) complete separation and segregation from the whites and the establishment of a caste system or peasant class; and (4) hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race. The only effect of such proposals is to confuse thinking on the vital issues involved and to foster impatience and intolerance.”
Though Chicago was considered the deadliest of such incidents, the 1919 Red Summer” saw white-led riots and racial crimes in three dozen other U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Omaha, Nebraska, Knoxville, Tennessee, Phillips County, Arkansas, and Longview, Texas. It would take decades for racial strife in these cities to subside.
Eugene Williams was buried in an unmarked grave in the segregated Lincoln Cemetery, according to researcher Tammy Gibson. And no one was ever held accountable for his death.
By 1970, more than six million African Americans had travelled the Great Migration and made Chicago home. Together, they forged new lives, faced new threats, and overcame all obstacles with unity, leadership, vision and purposeful direction.