One of most famous race riot in the history of Chicago occurred in the summer of 1919. The violence was precipitated by the drowning of an African American teenager who had crossed an invisible line at 29th Street separating customarily segregated “white” and “black” beaches. Soon, White and Black Chicagoans, especially in the South Side residential areas, engaged in a seven-day orgy of shootings, arsons, and beatings that resulted in the deaths of 15 Whites and 23 Blacks with an additional 537 injured (342 black, 195 white). The passions of this outbreak were rooted in pent-up tensions surrounding the massive migration of southern Blacks during World War I. Whites met the influx of Blacks into their cities with hostility, using intimidation and discrimination to block access to jobs and housing. Sometimes hired as strikebreakers, their increased industrial presence was viewed by many White workers as a threat to their own livelihoods.
On Sunday, July 27, 1919, an unusually hot summer day, Black seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams and four of his friends took a homemade wooden raft out into Lake Michigan on the South Side. They pushed off from 26th Street beach, the only beach in the city reserved for Black beachgoers and swimmers. Although there was no legal segregation in Chicago, de facto segregation was common including along the Lakefront. While in the water the boys unintentionally floated across an invisible boundary line demarcating a “whites only” part of the lake as well as the beach, at 29th Street. Before the boys knew they had drifted into the unforbidden waters, a White man on the shore, George Stauber spotted Williams in the White swimming area, and became insulted. He began throwing rocks at the Black kids. One of the teens, Eugene Williams, was hit in the head fell off the raft, plunged into the lake, and drowned.
The White police officer on duty at the beach, Daniel Callahan, refused to arrest Stauber, nor would Callahan let a Black police officer do so. It was not uncommon for the ethnic White Irish police officers to ignore White-on-Black crime in the city and that fact touched a raw nerve. Thousand of Black Chicagoans assembled at the 29th Street beach and demanded the police arrest Stauber for murder. They refused to arrest him. Police reinforcements massed at the scene but confronted the Black crowd rather than investigating Williams’s murder. A Black man named James Crawford, opened fire on a group of police officers. Crawford was immediately shot and killed. But the crowd did not disperse and other African American individuals began to attack other White individuals.
As word and rumors spread, the city erupted in racial violence. The majority of the rioting and violence was concentrated in the “Black Belt” section, the predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. It spread into nearby White ethnic neighborhoods like "Back of the Yards" and "Bridgeport", though violence also spread northward to the downtown Loop area as well as the near West Side. By nightfall, rumors of “race war” in White neighborhoods were running rampant, and the rioting began. White males, especially members of youth gangs and so-called “athletic clubs,” loaded into automobiles and sped through Black neighborhoods, firing indiscriminately at African Americans and their homes. Some of these gangs also set fire to tenement buildings inhabited mostly by Eastern European immigrants in order to stoke further tensions between working-class White communities and Black Chicagoans.
Richard J. Daley, who served as Chicago's powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976, was a 17-year-old member of an Irish-American organization called the Hamburg Athletic Club. Though an investigation later identified the club among the instigators of the rioting, Daley and his supporters never admitted that he participated in the violence. White mobs pulled African Americans from streetcars or in city parks and other public venues and attacked individuals walking to and from work, severely beating, and on several occasions, killing, their victims. White gang members also bombed and torched the homes of African Americans, leaving them homeless. At the height of the rioting, over four-fifths of Chicago’s 3,500 police officers had been sent to control the angry crowds.
Black people fought back, in particular World War I veterans, fought back in unprecedented numbers by returning fire or otherwise engaging in self-defense. Often gangs of men attacked and stabbed White civilians, but White rioters had superiority in numbers and firepower and in many cases the sympathy of the police. A street-level expression of the growing race consciousness catching fire swept across the country that summer. This spirit of resistance was famously captured in the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based writer Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” published in the socialist magazine "The Liberator" as a response to the race riots of the Red Summer. The rioting lasted almost a whole week. The Illinois governor, Frank Lowden, deployed 6,000 national guard soldiers to quell the violence and to bring much-needed provisions into the besieged Black Belt but eventually, a steady rain proved most effective in restoring peace.
Ultimately, the Chicago Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s office overwhelmingly blamed Black resistance for the violence and largely ignored or defended White perpetrators. The devastation wrought by the 1919 Chicago Race Riot was terrible, and so was the aftermath along with the Riot’s subsequent expulsion from official memory. Not only had hundreds been killed and injured, large swaths of property in working-class Black and white neighborhoods on the South Side also had been destroyed. Over a thousand Black families were left homeless. Some major employers—like the stockyards—temporarily closed during the Riot, leaving many workers without work or access to back pay. When the meatpacking plants reopened, some plant owners banned African Americans from returning to their jobs for fear of further clashes with White workers, which exacerbated the unemployment crisis. Civic leaders also lacked the funds and the will to prosecute most rioters. Only a handful were ever tried or saw any prison time. Most of those prosecuted were Black.
In August of 1919, Governor Lowden called for an investigation of Black life and race relations in the city of Chicago. The resulting twelve-person Chicago Commission on Race Relations was made up of prominent Black and White Chicagoans to look into the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them. The commission, suggested several key issues and represented an extraordinary effort at interracial collaboration, research, and resolution. African American sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson carried out most of the research. The resultant six-hundred-plus-page report, published in 1922 and entitled "The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot", remains a landmark of sociology. It covered the Great Migration, housing, employment, and social life for African Americans in Chicago, the causes and aftermath of the Riot, and surveys on public opinion regarding the city’s “race problem".
The Report extensively detailed the Commission’s findings of systemic racism in housing and employment policy, and the Commissioners ultimately provided recommendations to remedy these problems. The immediate aftermath of the riot laid the foundation for decades of racist policies aimed at containing Black Chicagoans. Carl Sandburg, already a renowned writer working for the Chicago Daily News, had been writing a series of articles designed to ease tension between the races. Sandburg based his recommendations on the input of locals, union members and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His articles detailed the root causes of the riots, which Charles S. Johnson had reported, that fueled the flames of anger on both sides.
President Woodrow Wilson publicly blamed White people for being the instigators of race-related riots in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and introduced efforts to foster racial harmony, including voluntary organizations and congressional legislation. In addition to drawing attention to the growing tensions in America’s urban centers, the riots in Chicago and other cities in the summer of 1919 marked the beginning of a growing willingness among African Americans to fight for their rights in the face of oppression and injustice. And despite the participation of many hundreds of Chicagoans in the 1919 riot, only 47 were eventually indicted. The riots themselves provoked new legal problems. After the end of the Chicago riots of 1919, the documented failure of the legal system to prosecute Whites in the same proportion to Blacks is a question of racial justice. In the 1920s, city government and industry embraced legal strategies to segregate Black people. Racially restrictive covenants barred Black Chicagoans from renting or owning residences outside of a small number of neighborhoods.