![]() ![]() An additional 1,000 Black families were left homeless after rioters torched their residences. Shootings, beatings and arson attacks eventually left 15 whites and 23 Blacks dead, and more than 500 more people (around 60 percent Black) injured. After police were unable to quell the riots, the state militia was called in on the fourth day, but the fighting continued until August 3. Violence soon broke out between gangs and mobs of Black and white, concentrated in the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. Angry crowds began to gather on the beach, and reports of the incident–many distorted or exaggerated–spread quickly. When police officers arrived on the scene, they refused to arrest the white man whom Black eyewitnesses pointed to as the responsible party. ![]() A group of white men threw stones at Williams, hitting him, and he drowned. On July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old African American boy named Eugene Williams was swimming with friends in Lake Michigan when he crossed the unofficial barrier (located at 29th Street) between the city’s “white” and “Black” beaches. Tensions ran highest on the city’s South Side, where the great majority of Black residents lived, many of them in old, dilapidated housing and without adequate services. Competition for jobs in the city’s stockyards was particularly intense, pitting African Americans against whites (both native-born and immigrants). The city’s African American population had increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 as of 1919. Knoxville, Tennessee Longview, Texas Phillips County, Arkansas Omaha, Nebraska and-most dramatically-Chicago. In the summer of 1919, race riots would break out in Washington, D.C. In this fraught atmosphere, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization revived its violent activities in the South, including 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919. ![]() 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. 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. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to become increasingly militant.ĭid you know? In the summer of 1919, Richard J. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices ran rampant. When the war ended in late 1918, thousands of servicemen returned home from fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern Black people or immigrants. The “Red Summer” of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I. ![]()
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