Homes in the Lithuanian neighborhood destroyed by arson.
In the end, the Lithuanian community did not rise to the bait. Across Packingtown and the Black Belt, people returned to their homes. The streets emptied out except for the troops of the militia stationed to secure order. The last attempt to stir up trouble had been put to rest.
Sunday dawned cool and quiet. As John Turner Harris woke, it had been exactly one week since the fateful day at the beach—seven days of death and destruction as the city purged the rage that had been building for so long. Blacks would not return to work for another four days. The militia would remain on guard until the following weekend. But on this Sunday, the anger was spent. The city pulled back to lick its wounds.
Epilogue
IN THE CHICAGO RIOT, 38 people of both races died, all of them men; 537 more were wounded. Newspaper headlines around the country shone a light on Chicago’s shame for all the world to see.
There had been other disturbances earlier that summer, in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The North was quick to label these outbreaks a southern problem; on July 23, the New York Times declared, “It could not have arisen in any Northern city.” Just four days later, Chicago proved that judgment terribly wrong.
The troubles didn’t end in Chicago, either. By the time the leaves turned color in the fall of 1919, America had experienced twenty-five riots, in large cities and small towns, from New York City to southern Arizona, an orgy of blood that would come to be called “Red Summer.” The problems were not peculiar to Chicago. This was America’s story. As one black minister commented, “It is not simply the shame of Chicago, but of the nation.”
Some people felt blindsided. A white minister stated at a union meeting, “This riot has come to us as a shock after all our idealism.” Others, like the editor of the Defender, were saddened but not surprised, judging that “those who believe . . . that the regrettable affair at the bathing beach here in Chicago was sufficient to set in motion this machine of destruction, are far from the right track.”
The problems had been under the city’s nose all along, if only it had chosen to address them. But before the riots, Chicago and cities across the country were focused on their successes—the money to be made, the technological innovations, the larger-than-life men and women, such as the Swifts, who stood tall as models of economic progress. Problems of the immigrant and black communities were swept under the dazzling carpet of success, where they grew until they forced their way into the open.
After the riot, Chicago had a choice. It could wash its hands of responsibility, placing blame on the poor. Or it could own up to its complicity. Some individuals took the narrow view, insisting that the culpability and the solution lay with the mobs. One man wrote a letter to the Tribune stating, “If the lawless insist on rioting, deal with them according to law, and we will soon be rid of them.”
An editorial cartoon in the Chicago Daily News named the causes of the riot.
Chicago chose the braver path. Responding to a call by T. Arnold Hill and other leaders of both races, a twelve-member commission—six blacks, six whites—was appointed to study the factors that led to the riot and to make recommendations for how to move the city forward. Charles S. Johnson, who interviewed Mississippi migrants in 1917, was a lead investigator for the commission.
The commission took its work seriously, reviewing records and talking with both well-known leaders and ordinary men and women. The final 651-page report detailed the causes of the riot and proposed a plan of action, calling on all Chicago citizens—police, government officials, employers, unions, churches, the press, and members of the public—to take ownership of the goal, so “that the civic conscience of the community should be aroused.” The commission cautioned, “The remedy is necessarily slow.” And it was. But some city leaders made an effort to step up in new ways.
The first task was bringing the rioters to justice. The city’s actions in this regard were only partly successful.
Despite Officer Callahan’s refusal to arrest him, George Stauber, the young man who threw the deadly rock that started the riot, was brought before the courts and tried for the intentional manslaughter of Eugene Williams. He was acquitted by a jury on May 27, 1920.
Officer Callahan was temporarily suspended from the police force but was soon allowed to return to his beat. He showed no remorse, telling the commission, “If a Negro should say one word back to me or should say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of young men of the district, mostly ex-service men, who would procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble should come from the incident.”
One hundred and twenty-eight indictments were brought for the beatings, shootings, stabbings, and arson. But justice did not roll for blacks as it did for whites: two-thirds of the riot victims were black, but only one-third of those indicted were white. As the commission observed, this “suggests the conclusion that whites were not apprehended as readily as Negroes.”
Eugene Williams’s death certificate.
The grand jury was unwilling to be a passive participant in this injustice. As reported by Ida Wells-Barnett, they pointed out that blacks “couldn’t have created a riot by themselves” and refused to hear any more cases “until some white men were brought in.” Some grand jurors approached Ida for assistance. She recalled: “I offered to present [to the grand jury] dozens of persons who had brought me stories of their mistreatment. This I did. Some who were afraid to go to the criminal courts building came to my home after dark and told their stories to members of the grand jury who came out to hear them.”
John Turner Harris was one of those who were too scared to talk. The story did spill out when he talked to Eugene Williams’s mother as they grieved together at the funeral of his drowned friend. But he never told police what he knew. It was not until fifty years later that Harris, working as a social worker and still living in Chicago, finally told his story.
For the thirty-eight riot deaths, twenty-one people were indicted, seventeen black, four white. Of the indicted, five were convicted: three blacks and two whites.
After the riot, the city braced itself for the possibility of more violence. Mayor Thompson quickly acted to shut down the gangs, but before long, the gangs’ political allies had them back in business. On May 17, 1920, union organizer John Kikulski was shot and killed as he stood in front of his home. No one was ever convicted of the murder. Some pointed a finger at Irish union leaders who did not see eye to eye with Kikulski. Police suspected that the assassins were gang members.
Seven years later, Ragen’s Colts were finally disbanded. But over the decade following the riot, gangs and organized crime continued to operate unchecked by the mayor, angering enough citizens that Thompson was voted out in 1931, never to hold office again.
Violence did continue after the riot ended. Six bombs exploded in the latter half of 1919, twelve more in 1920. A white member of the commission complained, “There seems to be no authority interested in the protection of Americans whose skins are black.”
The Chicago Defender (August 30, 1919) questioned the integrity of the post-riot investigation. The cartoon shows Justice barred from the room where the investigators met.
Predictions of another riot came fast and furious in 1919 and 1920—warnings to expect a bloodbath on Labor Day, on Halloween, on May Day. But no further riots occurred. The commission concluded, “People of both races acted with such courage and promptness as to end the trouble early.” The powerful tide of emotion had receded.
Lake Michigan still washes onto the sand at both Twenty-Sixth Street and Twenty-Ninth Street. On a hot day, white and black children splash side by side in the cool waters. To the west, century-old mansions and apartment buildings of the Black Belt stand alongside modern townhouses and high-rises in the predominantly black neighborhood that the residents now proudly call Bronzeville. Though the Barnetts, Abbott, Jackson, and Hill are long gone, the Defender, the Urban League, the NAA
CP, and Quinn Chapel remain cornerstones of the community, still called home by both middle class and poor. A busy interstate road divides Bronzeville from the communities that were Packingtown. With the development of interstate highways in the 1950s, meatpacking and shipping could take place in plants located closer to the farms where livestock was raised. Swift & Company, along with the other big meatpackers, moved out of Chicago to locations south and west. But the Great Gate of the Union Stock Yard still stands, just down the road from well-kept old homes on streets that the Irish now share with Asian and Latino families.
In the century since the riot, progress has come in fits and starts. Fifty years of continued migration from the South increased blacks’ political muscle on the local level. In some cases, blacks have forged alliances with whites and Latinos to elect black mayors, senators, and congressmen. If Robert Horton had been alive in 2008, he surely would have preserved for posterity his November 5 copy of the Chicago Defender, announcing Barack Obama’s election as the first black president of the United States.
Blacks have slowly begun to climb the economic ladder. A few have become owners of large corporations, some have risen to top levels in Fortune 500 companies, and larger numbers work as midlevel managers.
Still, America’s present echoes its past. As of this writing, today’s disparity between rich and poor is as wide as the divide between Swift and his laborers one hundred years ago. Nearly one-quarter of America’s city dwellers live in poverty. One percent of all Americans take home nearly twenty percent of all earnings.
Black America is the bleakest of all. Ten million black men and women are laboring long hours in unskilled jobs, earning barely enough to get by. Nearly one in ten blacks—twice the rate of whites—are out of work at this writing, scanning job boards, filling out online applications, and standing in line at modern-day shapeups, hoping to land a job. There are one million young men roaming the streets in gangs, following in the footsteps of Ragen’s Colts, brandishing guns to protect their turf. Around a third of these gang members are black. Millions of black men, women, and children are beginning and ending their days in rundown, paint-peeling, pipes-leaking homes reminiscent of the old communities of Packingtown and the Black Belt. Black men can expect to die, on average, five years younger than white men.
Full-blown riots have been few and far between. After 1919, the next large-scale unrest exploded nearly a half century later, when blacks took to the streets in cities across the country during the civil rights movement. Another twenty years passed before anger and distrust ignited rioting in Los Angeles in 1992. Between explosions, frustration and despair simmer. As President Obama has reminded us, if we look closely we will see the “quiet riots” on “any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton . . . born from the same place as the fires and the destruction . . . [that] happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates.” In 2015, this disconnect was once again forced into the light of day as violence surged in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, and Baltimore.
In 1919, the riot investigation commission concluded, “But for [white gangs] it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” In riots that have followed, poor blacks have been the ones to explode. But the riots have a common cause, as named by the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Dr. King was equally clear that future riots are not inevitable: “Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
Ida Wells-Barnett understood that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” She never stopped working for a better world. Now men, women, and children all around us continue to follow in her footsteps. As fires burned in Baltimore, a five-year-old black child worked with neighbors and volunteers, sweeping up the debris, a small beginning toward picking up the pieces of her community. A black pastor worked with white businessmen to plan rebuilding of a Baltimore community center destroyed in the riot. In Ferguson, Missouri, artists, black and white, came together to paint murals of hope on boarded-up businesses. In New York, Chicago, and all across America, successful adults share their knowledge about the work world with middle-and high-schoolers. Police officers volunteer to read to students in public schools. Students are creating films, plays, and poems and are engaging with one another online to share their anger and also their hopes and ideas for a better tomorrow.
The challenge remains deep and wide. Human attention spans are short. Carl Sandburg, who witnessed and wrote about Chicago’s 1919 riot, penned a poem about the cycle of convulsion and complacency: “Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.” As we, the people, move forward, the ghosts of the Chicago riot of 1919 and of the other riots across the nation in that Red Summer whisper in the streets, calling us all to remember.
I Am the People, the Mob
I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
—Carl Sandburg
Notes
THERE ARE MANY GREAT SOURCES of information on the economic, social, and political history of Chicago that ultimately exploded in the 1919 riot. Among these, there are several works that were instrumental in my broader research of the history leading up to the riot. Reference to these works is abbreviated as follows.
ABBREVIATIONS
WCJ
James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
IW
James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).
NIC
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).
FB
Margaret Garb, Freedom’s Ballot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
LH
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
AK
Anatanas Kaztauskis, “From Lithuania to the Chicago Stockyards—An Autobiography,” recorded by Ernest Poole, Official Journal, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America 5 (September 1904).
BC
Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century, vol. 1, 1833–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
YY
Louis Franklin Swift and Arthur Van Vlissingen, Jr., The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1927).
RR
William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
IBW
Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
CHAPTER 1: THE BEACH
6 “KEEP COOL! . . . Beaches Today”: Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1919.
7 “the bathing point of the south side”:
Chicago Defender, July 5, 1919.
7 “As long as the raft was there, we were safe”: RR, 5 (from Tuttle interview with John Harris, 1969).
11 “One fellow . . . we would duck”: RR, 6 (from Tuttle interview with John Harris, 1969).
11 stone meeting forehead: The coroner’s report did not note any bruises on Eugene Williams’s forehead. However, newspapers and the 1920 report of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations corroborate John Harris’s recollections on this point.
11 “I shook . . . blood coming up”: RR, 6–7 (from Tuttle interview with John Harris, 1969).
11 “Oh, my God”: RR, 7 (from Tuttle interview with John Harris, 1969).
CHAPTER 2: A TIME TO REAP
12 “I wasn’t . . . cool myself down”: RR, 8 (from Tuttle interview with John Harris, 1969).
13 “For years . . . whirlwind”: Chicago Defender, August 2, 1919.
CHAPTER 3: FREEDOM FIGHT
19 “but they . . . the community”: BC, 93.
19 “‘Mrs. Jones . . . ‘Yes’”: Blanchard, Discovery and Conquests of the Northwest, with the History of Chicago, volume 2, 301.
20 “content with . . . settled on him”: BC, 73.
22 “revolting to . . . from oppression”: Karamanski and McMahon, Civil War Chicago, 18.
23 “As there are times . . . self-protection”: Chicago Daily Journal, October 3, 1850.
A Few Red Drops Page 11