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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.

Friday, August 8

The next day, problems continued at the stockyards. The meatpackers insisted that only 4,500 workers had refused to come to work on Friday and that no more than a third of the workers had walked out by the end of the day. In contrast, the Stockyards Labor Council claimed that twenty thousand workers were out by noon, that forty thousand had walked off the job by day’s end, and that half of the workers who left were Black.

The Chicago Tribune declared the situation at the stockyards a crisis. It was one complicated by a very public disagreements about why the police and guards were in the Yards. Garrity continued to insist the police were there at the request of the companies and could not be removed until the packers requested it. The meat packers assured everyone that the guards and officers were in the Yards at the request of the military and the police and that since they “were under the jurisdiction of the police and the militia” they were powerless to remove the armed guards from the area.

As the Yards seethed, the City Council returned its attention once again to policing the city's Black citizens. The council's police committee met with the chief of police in Detroit. He explained that he had prevented a race riot by ordering his men to seize all guns, blackjacks, rifles and other weapons from dealers in the city. Asked how he managed to do so legally, he said: “I happened to be out in the country when I received word that the Negroes were buying blackjacks and shotguns. At that minute I ordered the police to collect all of the blackjacks, shotguns, and other weapons from all of the dealers. They obeyed orders. I did not ask for any legal view on the subject.”

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