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‘Ready To Explode’

How a black teen’s drifting raft triggered a deadly week of riots 100 years ago in Chicago.
Black men confront armed whites in a Chicago street.
Chicago History Museum/AP

Deadly attacks in stockyards, downtown

The true horrors of the 1919 riots began to emerge the day after the raucous scene following Williams’ death at the beach, just as many unsuspecting black men were leaving for work that Monday afternoon.

Athletic clubs — youth gangs sanctioned by Irish-American politicians like the Ragen’s Colts, the Alywards and the Hamburgs (who counted future Mayor Richard J. Daley as a member) — had cranked up their attacks on black citizens in the weeks leading up to riots, history professor William Tuttle Jr. wrote in his seminal 1970 book “Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919.”

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations’ report on the incident would describe terrifying early scenes:

  • A 30-year-old black stockyard worker heading home was chased from a streetcar by 50 white men from a crowd of 400 on the street and fatally beaten near 47th Street and Normal Avenue. Twenty minutes later, another black man was fatally stabbed while fleeing a mob in Bridgeport.
  • Downtown, two middle-aged black men were chased down and killed by a “mob of white civilians, soldiers, and sailors, who had been chasing, beating and robbing blacks through the Loop for two or three hours. The bodies of one of the men was robbed by rioters.”
  • White gangs soon targeted black households that bordered their communities in Back of the Yards, Englewood and Bridgeport. Mobs drove families from their homes, which were then firebombed.
  • A raid on a streetcar full of black passengers left a father and son dead and the mother severely wounded. The daughter escaped.

Rumors and poor relations with white officers tasked with keeping the calm fueled rage and led to black retaliation.

“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 very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get,” stated the 1922 race relations report titled “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot."

The legacy

The end of the riots brought swift condemnation, expert groups to examine the cause and criminal charges — though primarily against alleged black rioters — but no real consensus on what to do. On the latter point, in the days after the riots, Cook County State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne initially charged only black citizens with rioting, leading to a walkout by members of the grand jury hearing the cases.