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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.

When two white men accused of bombing Black homes in Chicago were found guilty in 1921, the Chicago Defender tied those convictions to verdicts in favor of Black individuals who sued the city for damages caused by the city’s 1919 race riots. Those legal events, the paper claimed, demonstrated that Chicago's courts treated the city's Black citizens fairly (though the paper also noted those verdicts demonstrated just how little the police had done to protect Black people in the city during the riots).

The Defender was too kind. The police failed Black Chicagoans during the 1919 race riots, and the prosecutor and the courts failed them in the months that followed.

Unfortunately, the full extent of those failures are hidden from view, because few records of the various riot trials remain. But we do have the trial transcript and appeal record from one riot trial involving Black defendants. And those records paint an ugly picture of perjured testimony, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and judges who stood by and did nothing.

This is the story of that case.

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1. 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.
2. Black Rights in Chicago Before 1919
3. Dead Lines: July 27 to August 11, 1919
4. Two Societies
5. Unequal Justice Before the Law
6. 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.
7. The 1920s
10. Appendix: Chicago's Police Department

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