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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.

Citizen-Soldiers

Because the violence seemed to be under control, the Chicago Daily News took a moment to celebrate the National Guard, loudly praising the way the “citizen in uniform” modeled democracy. After spending their days guarding the city streets, the “prosperous business men and high salaried professional men in privates’ uniforms” that made up the citizen-soldiers went back to their barracks where they swept and performed other military chores, just like common grunts. Although he did not frame the National Guard's role in quite those terms, Governor Lowden echoed that enthusiasm, thanking the troops for going “into a district where murder, arson, and anarchy existed for four days” and bringing peace and quiet. Careful not to tread on any political toes, Lowden also acknowledged the work the police had done in the days before the guard came into the city, and the coordination between the police and militia (he did not mention the sheriff's special police) once the guard had been ordered into the city.

Where earlier stories described unsmiling men with machine guns stationed at various street corners or grim troops with bayonets at the ready marching through the streets, by Friday, most of the riot-related articles in Chicago’s mainstream press focused on the warm relations between the troops and Chicago's citizens. One paper reported that Frank Gunsaulus, the President of the Armour Institute, a college at 3300 S. Federal Street, sought out the commander of Company B at 5:00 in the morning to thank the men for letting him finally have a good night’s sleep.

An article in the Daily News recounted tales of Black and white Chicagoans offering gifts to the soldiers. Whites and Blacks on the South Side brought the guardsmen food and coffee; the owner of a Chinese restaurant on State Street opened his business to one troop, while the manager of a cabaret at Twenty-Sixth and Indiana allowed another to turn his bar into a shower. A Black church at Sixty-First and Loomis Streets let some soldiers use it as a barracks; the Prairie Theater, at Prairie Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street, became headquarters for another regiment. An aged Black woman approached an officer at Sixty-Second and Ada Streets and, after curtseying to him, offered him a handful of small coins she had gathered from other women in her neighborhood. The officer turned down the money and told her to tell the people in her neighborhood that they would help the militia the most if they went to bed early and stayed off the streets.

The National Guard troops may have represented democracy at its finest, but the actions of some troop commanders raised questions about their understanding of the constitution. Based on reports he had gotten that all the Blacks and many of the whites in the city were armed, Colonel Lorenzen, commander of the First Battalion, tried to obtain permission to search all the houses in the Black Belt. “The riot zone,” he warned, “is filled with private arsenals.” Attorney General Edward Brundage squelched that idea, reminding Lorenzen that Chicago would need to be placed under martial law before he could permit such unconstitutional actions. Colonel Anson Bolte, commander of the Third Regiment, created his own share of controversy when he seized and destroyed all the copies of the Chicago Whip to prevent its distribution on Saturday on the grounds that the coverage of the riot in the issue was inflammatory.

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Friday Afternoon, August 1 Given the wide-spread conviction that things were calming down, it was odd that Police Chief Garrity chose that afternoon to order that all saloons, cabarets, poolrooms, clubrooms, and other places “where men congregate for other than religious purposes” be closed in the area between Twenty-Second Street to the north and Sixty-Ninth Street to the south, and from Ashland Avenue on the west to Lake Michigan on the east.

The order was broad, and the area it covered encompassed many of the white athletic clubs' houses, the stockyard area saloons, and the entire Black Belt. And it had no time frame; police captains in the affected districts told one newspaper that they assumed the order would be in effect until the “riot spirit” was thoroughly crushed.

Events that night help explain the puzzle. That evening, the National Guard helped enforce Garrity's order, closing clubs and other public meeting places. Consistent with the pattern already established by the police, they focused their attention on Black spaces. One troop raided a Black-run gambling house. It was unclear whether the raid was intended to wipe out a pocket of the vice that some thought was the cause of the riots or was prompted by a tip about weapons, but the detachment drove nearly fifty Black men from the building and seized more than twenty knives and razors.

Another group of patrolling soldiers found a Black man standing watch on a rooftop in the Black Belt and turned him over to the police.

Guardsmen had a slightly harder time with George Seart when they tried to disarm him, and it took six guardsmen to get Seart’s weapons. The Daily News reported that they confiscated two pistols, two knives, five razors, and ammunition, which the paper speculated proved that Seart was “an organizer among the lawless Blacks” who had been supplying Black people with weapons.
Attorney General Edward J. Brundage Edward Jackson Brundage was born May 13, 1869. He was an attourney with a degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law, and he served as Illinois Attorney General from 1917 to1925.

During the 1919 riots, Brundage prevented Colonel Lorenzen from searching all houses in the Black Belt. After the riots, Brundage joined State's Attorney Maclay Hoyne and Coroner Peter Hoffman to conduct, they said, “the greatest criminal investigation in the history of the state.” However, after the grand jury strike, Brundage spoke out against the state's attorney office. Every Black citizen, he explained, had “political rights, and those rights, given him by law, [that] he should be entitled to enjoy. Those who would deny them are lawless, and if the law is to be venerated all laws must be honored.” He then disappeared from efforts to prosecute the riot cases.

He died January 20, 1934.

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Governor Frank O. Lowden