93 years ago tonight: the start of the Chicago Race Riots...

[Cooley Hurd]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Race_Riot_of_1919

Chicago Race Riot of 1919

Starting with a white man throwing rocks at blacks in the water at a beach on the South Side which resulted in an African American's death, conflict escalated when police did not arrest the white man but arrested a black man instead. Objections by blacks were met with violence by whites. Attacks between whites and blacks erupted swiftly. At one point a mob of white men threatened Provident Hospital, many of whose patients were African American. The police held them off. The riot lasted for nearly a week, ending only after the government deployed nearly 6,000 National Guard troops. They stationed them around the Black Belt to prevent further white attacks. By the night of July 30, most violence had ended. Most of the rioting, murder, and arson was the result of ethnic whites attacking the African-American population in the city's Black Belt on the South Side. Most of the casualties and property damage were suffered by blacks. Newspaper accounts noted numerous attempts at arson; for instance, on July 31, more than 30 fires were started in the Black Belt before noon and were believed to be due to arson. Steel cables had been put across the streets to prevent fire trucks from entering the areas. The Mayor's office was told of a plan to burn down the black area and run its residents out of town. There were also sporadic violent attacks in other areas of the city, including the Chicago Loop. In the rioting, 38 people died (23 African Americans and 15 whites), and 537 were injured (two-thirds were African Americans). Patrolman John W. Simpson was the only policeman who was killed in the riot. Approximately 1000 residents, mostly African Americans, were left homeless after fires destroyed their homes. Numerous African-American families left the city by train before the rioting had ended, returning to families in the South.

Chief of Police John J. Garrity closed "all places where men congregate for other than religious purposes" to help restore order. Governor Frank Lowden authorized the deployment of the 11th Illinois Infantry and its machine gun company, as well as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd reserve militia. These four units totaled 3,500 men. The Cook County Sheriff deputized between 1000 and 2000 former soldiers to help keep the peace. With the reserves and militia guarding the Black Belt, the city arranged for emergency provisions to supply its residents with fresh food. Whites delivered food and supplies to the line established by the military; from there, deliveries were distributed within the Black Belt by African Americans. In addition, while industry was closed, the packing plants arranged to deliver pay to certain areas so African-American men could pick up their money.

After order was restored, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden was urged to create a state committee to study the cause of the riots. He proposed forming a committee to write a racial code of ethics and to draw up racial boundaries for activities within the city.

[RKP5637]

1. K&R !!! I never knew this! Thanks for posting this! n/t

[Cooley Hurd]

2. I didn't know, either

...until I read about in on Wikipedia's main page today. What a horrible event and, at the same time, a teachable moment.

[RKP5637]

3. ... horrible events and teachable moments often just

fade into history. There's a lot to be learned from them so history does not repeat.

[Rhiannon12866]

4. K&R! Yikes! How horrific! I didn't know, either!

A bit before my time... Thanks for the reminder. If we don't remember and learn from history, we're condemned to repeat it, to paraphrase the famous quote...

[pampango]

5. Just after the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North began in WWI.

The North was a better place than the Jim Crow South, but the "welcome" for these migrants was usually very harsh. Prior to the GM 90% of AA's still lived in the South.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)

[Honeycombe8]

10. I'm not so sure that was true all over the south. I'm from the deep south.

A small town in south La. I was born in the '50s. I became aware before the age of 10 that blacks had a tough row to hoe...no good job opportunities, etc. However, in my small town, at least, where everyone knew everyone, whites and blacks treated each other respectfully and decently. They knew each other. No one would've dreamed of preventing anyone from voting. There was still segregation. Just like women in small towns "stayed in their place," so did blacks. It wasn't right, it wasn't good for all. But everyone peacefully existed w/o being violent or mean of disrespectful to each other.

That's just how you survive in small towns. When you know someone, you're not as likely to be violent with them.

When civil rights came along, the position of blacks shifted to be one of non-segregation. No violence. There was some grumbling because of forced bussing, and many whites didn't believe that the two races should attend school together. But there was no resistance to it. (I lived in a larger deep southern city by then...but still not a large city.) We saw riots on TV and viewed them mainly as a yankee thing and didn't understand them. I don't remember sseeing the Birmingham incidents on TV. But there again, that was a big city, compared to where I lived. And it WAS Alabama. I wouldn't advise anyone of color to try to live in Alabama, even now.

That's not to say that there weren't lynchings and a still visible KKK presence throughout areas of the south. There were. But many areas were like the ones that I experienced. People just living their day to day lives, accepting how things were. And when things changed, they cont'd to live their day to day lives, accepting how things were at that time.

[kickysnana]

6. My father-in-law was born in November fo that year.

His parents up from Alabama were newlyweds, looking for work off the farm. His Dad a veteran of WWI had survived the Spanish flu which killed his brother in Basic Camp in Michigan in the same unit. I cannot imagine being pregnant during a riot like that.

My father-in-laws Grandpa owned a small farm in Alabama and had 13 kids 9 lived to adults, but life was difficult depending on the crops. His Dad ran away at 14 but got caught and placed into slavery somewhere in West Virginia. He escaped at 17 and went back home to Alabama where he worked about a year then he married and immediately moved to Chicago.

My mother-in-law was pregnant with her first child from her first husband when the riot broke out in Detroit in 1943. Some of her family moved on to Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor because of it. Her Dad was a barber born in Georgia, her Mom who looked white was born in Indianapolis to a white businessman and a high mulatto widow of a goldsmith who had been killed in a robbery in KY. Both my mother-in-law and her mother passed for white and my Mother-in-law did some professional modeling in Detroit when she was in her late teens. That family left Indianapolis just before the peak of the Klan there about 1920.

Now they say all the gains for blacks have been erased back to 1967 and mean, bigoted people are again in charge of many things. It was something I thought long and hard about before I married in 1974, and had kids. Was I strong enough to endure if things got bad again? Could I teach my kids to be strong enough to endure? I hope we don't have to find out.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Incredible family story!

Thanks so much for sharing it with us. As far as we think we have come from those terrible times, it's unbelievable that the election of our first black president, something to be proud of and truly the right man for the times, would cause us to regress. It shows that we have not learned from our past and that's a terrible thing.

[HiPointDem]

8. Competition for jobs & housing. Also, later-Mayor Daley was one of the white gangbangers.

Just like today, different ethnic groups were moved into areas to keep wages down -- as "competion" for the previously-established workers.

And just like today, workers blamed each other rather than making common cause against the bosses.

The seventeen-year-old Daley was, at the very least, extremely close to the violence. Bridgeport was a major center of riot activity: by one estimate, 41 percent of all the encounters occurred in and around Daley's neighborhood. South Side youth gangs, including the Hamburg Athletic Club, were later found to have been among the primary instigators of the racial violence. "For weeks, in the spring and summer of 1919, they had been anticipating, even eagerly awaiting, a race riot," one study found. "On several occasions, they themselves had endeavored to precipitate one, and now that racial violence threatened to become generalized and unrestrained throughout Chicago, they were set to exploit the chaos."

The Chicago Commission on Human Relations eventually concluded that without these gangs "it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash." It is also clear that Joseph McDonough, patron of the Hamburg Athletic Club and later Daley's political mentor, actively incited the white community at the time of the riots. McDonough was quoted in the press saying that blacks had "enough ammunition . . . to last for years of guerrilla warfare," and that he had seen police captains warning white South Side residents: "For God's sake, arm. They are coming; we cannot hold them." At the City Council, McDonough told police chief John J. Garrity that "unless something is done at once I am going to advise my people to arm themselves for protection."

Was Daley himself involved in the bloody work of the 1919 race riots? His defenders have always insisted he was not, arguing that it would have been more in character for him to be attending to "his studies" or "family affairs" while much of the Irish-Catholic youth of Bridgeport were out bashing heads. But Daley's critics have long "pictur[ed] him in the pose of a brick-throwing thug." It strains credulity, they say, for Daley to have played no part in the riots when the Hamburg Athletic Club was so heavily involved — particularly when he was only a few years away from being chosen as the group's president. Daley's close ties to McDonough, who played an inflammatory role, also argue for involvement. Adding to the suspicions, Daley always remained secretive about the riots, and declined to respond to direct questions on the subject. It was a convenient political response that allowed Daley to play both sides of the city's racial divide: whites from the ethnic neighborhoods could believe that Daley was a youthful defender of the South Side color line, while blacks could choose to believe the opposite.

Daley's role, or lack of role, is likely lost to history, in part because the police and prosecutors never pursued the white gang members who instigated the violence. At the least, it can be said that Daley was an integral member of a youth gang that played an active role in one of the bloodiest antiblack riots in the nation's history — and that within a few years' time, this same gang would think enough of Daley to select him as its leader.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070811024349/http://www.chicagohistory.info/stories/daley/racism.html

shit like daley rises to the top in such an environment.

[Cooley Hurd]

9. Thank you for the info!

Richard Daley was a thug - wouldn't be surprised if he was one of the rioters. That, of course, puts his actions at the '68 convention into a new light.

[mia]

11. White gangs even invented a new form, the drive-by shooting:

http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc/ganghistory/Industrial%20Era/Riotbegins.html

"Automobile raids were added to the rioting on Monday night. Cars from which rifle and revolver shots were fired were driven at great spead through sections inhabited by Negroes." (6) No white raiders were arrested and Blacks began "sniping" in retaliation. Chicago's Police Chief admitted to the Commission: "There is no doubt that a great many police officers were grossly unfair in making arrests. They shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were veryvigorous in gettijng all the colored men they could get." (34). Twice as many blacks were arrested than whites.

The next day gang violence grew worse:

"A white gang of soldiers and sailors in uniform, augmented by civilians, raide the "Loop" or downtown section of Chicago, early Tuesday, killing two Negroes and beating and robbing several others…..Gangs sprang up as far south as Sixty-third Street in Englewood and in the section west of Wentworth Avenue near Forty-seventh Street. Premeditated depredations were the order of the night. Many Negro homes in mixed districts were attacked, and several of them were burned." Lasalle Street railroad station was invaded twice, with white gangs hunting for Black workers or riders (20).

Rain seemed to calm the riot for a few days and fires in the Stock Yards left 948 people, mainly Lithuanians, homeless. While Blacks were blamed for the fires, the Grand Jury suspected they were started by back of the Yards white gangs "for the purpose of inciting race feeling by blaming same on the blacks." (16). But by then, the riot had run its course....



Thank you for your post. I didn't know about this early race riot until today.