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Fight for Rights: The Chicago 1919 Riots and the Struggle for Black Justice 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. 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.

Battling Discriminatory Laws

In 1847, John Jones wrote a series of articles in opposition to Article 14 of the proposed new state constitution, which directed the state legislature to pass “such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and staying in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state for the purpose of setting them free.”

In her recent book, the historian Martha Jones demonstrates that, even before the Civil War, free Black people laid claim to rights by pointing out they were “birthright” or “natural-born citizens” of the United States. In his 1847 challenge, John Jones used the second term, condemning Article 14 for permitting discrimination against “natural-born citizens of the United States” because of the color of their skin.

John Jones's arguments did not persuade; the new constitution was adopted with Article 14 intact. Through the years, as that provision and the Illinois Black Code remained on the books, Jones continued to challenge them both. In 1853, he participated in a convention of Black men that met in Chicago to condemn state laws that denied Black individuals their rights. When the federal government passed the new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Jones helped draft a report denouncing it as unconstitutional and called on the people of Chicago, particularly the city’s Black community, to actively resist its enforcement. At his urging, three hundred Black men and women, at that point most of the Black population in the city, gathered and voted to oppose the act.

In 1850, Chicago did not yet have a police department, so the meeting also created a private, all-Black vigilance committee to patrol at night looking for “designing individuals,” a singularly nice way of describing slave catchers. Chicago's city government endorsed both resolutions and so did at least some of the city’s white population. In 1853, when a U.S. Marshal seized an unnamed Black man in Chicago, a mob of Chicagoans stopped the arrest and set the captive free.

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