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Fight for Rights: The Chicago 1919 Riots and the Struggle for Black Justice Main Menu Introduction This is a history of the fight for rights and citizenship undertaken by Black people in Chicago in that city’s first century. Covering the period from the 1830s to 1930s, this book looks at their successes and the forces that arose—in the streets, in city government, in the courts, and on the police force—to limit their extent. And it looks at how, and why, individuals and institutions attempted to justify those limits over time. Black Rights in Chicago Before 1919 The Chicago Race Riots were part of a larger and longer struggle for Black rights in Chicago. This section steps back to the beginning of Illinois and Chicago history, to set the stage for the riots by revealing the arguments against Black rights and the actions they inspired, during the first one hundred years of Illinois history. Dead Lines: July 27 to August 11, 1919 The violence that we now call the Chicago Race Riots took place across two weeks in late July and early August of 1919. This chapter recreates those events, setting them against backdrops of political posturing, continued white racism, and Black activism. Two Societies After the riots were over, Chicagoans adjusted to the world the riots had made. This section traces those initial adjustments and then looks at the conclusions drawn by an interracial committee created by Governor Lowden to assess the causes and results of the riots. Unequal Justice Before the Law Governor Lowden’s interracial commission on the riots condemned the work of the police during the riots but offered the hope that the legal system would provide protections for Chicago’s Black citizens. Unfortunately, a close look at the criminal justice system continued to deny Black individuals equal justice under the law more often than not. Miscarriage of Justice Few legal records from the riot cases remain, but the one case we do have, a murder trial involving two Black teens, demonstrates how badly the legal system failed Black Chicagoans in the aftermath of the riots. In that case, those failures were not an accident. Government officials, judges, and jurors willfully ignored (and sometimes created) problems of law and facts in order to win convictions of the two teens. The 1920s The weaknesses of law and justice revealed in the immediate aftermath of the riots continued into the 1920s, setting the stage for the problems of racist injustice that continue to plague Chicago’s criminal justice system 100 years later. Conclusion: Broken City Additional Sources & Bibliography Appendix: Chicago's Police Department The legal failures that have undermined racial justice in Chicago have long been exacerbated by the way the city trained and used its police department. This appendix provides a brief history of how and why Chicago’s police department began to see itself as an army protecting some people in the city from the others. Appendix: Voices from Chicago's First Hundred Years LibraryPress@UF, eds. Perry Collins and Rebecca McNulty. © Elizabeth Dale 2021. Shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. ISBN 978-1-944455-17-0. Media is in the public domain or used under a claim of fair use except where otherwise noted.

Age

The ages of both Charles Johnson and Walter Colvin are a bit of a mystery. At trial, Charles Johnson testified that he had turned eighteen on April 8, 1919; Walter Colvin testified that he turned sixteen on May 12, 1919. Consistent with that, in their verdict, the trial jury specifically found that Colvin was sixteen and Johnson seventeen. Yet their official records at the Illinois State Penitentiary state that Johnson was seventeen at the time he was admitted and that Colvin was sixteen. And in 1931, the Illinois Board of Pardons declared that Charles Johnson was sixteen when he went to trial.

Throughout this study, I use the ages Colvin and Johnson testified to at their trial.

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Taking a Second Look When one juror interrupted to ask Herman if she knew any of the boys she identified, she insisted that she had never seen them before. That was odd, as all four lived very near her. Walter Colvin lived with his mother and several siblings just a few doors down from her laundry, at 3608 S. State Street. Charles Johnson lived around the corner, at 53 W. Thirty-Sixth Street, with his older brother, Joseph and Joseph’s wife, Corrine. John Green lived two streets to the west with his parents, at 3627 S. Federal Street. And Frank Coachman lived with his mother and father two streets to the south, at 3845 S. State Street.

It was also apparently a lie, since she had admitted moments before that she had noticed “little Walter” in the hearing room.

Nor can her identifications of the four teens be squared with her description of the men involved in killing Temple. Charles Johnson was eighteen. Frank Coachman, born in September 1902, was still sixteen, as was Walter Colvin, who had been born in May 1903. John Green, who was so young that the Chicago Defender said he still wore short pants, was born in 1905.

While there are no photos of any of the four in the record, Herman referred to Frank Coachman and John Green as “little boy” at least once each and pointed to “little Walter” on another occasion. Official reports listed both Johnson and Colvin as 5’ 7” tall and “medium stout,” though “stout” seemed to be an elastic term: Johnson weighed 163 pounds, while Colvin, at 147 pounds, was nearly twenty pounds lighter.

Other issues troubled the jurors. One said he had heard that Herman had fainted at the police station and asked if she was subject to fainting spells. She admitted that she had fainted at the station because she had been ill at the time, adding “I am only out of the hospital a short while.” A juror asked her if she had not been near to fainting just a few minutes before while she was giving testimony. She denied it but agreed that she had been under the care of and had been operated on earlier in the summer. Asked what the operation was for, she said she could not remember the long name.