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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.

Sunday, July 27

In the days that followed, newspapers struggled to describe the frenzy that mowed through the South Side of Chicago on Sunday night. According to the Chicago Defender, the city’s leading Black newspaper, Sunday evening was a tale of revenge. That paper reported that Black people enraged by Williams’s death had stopped streetcars near Thirty-Fifth and State Streets and “[e]very white face was taken from the cars and severely beaten.” Other Blacks stopped automobiles driven by whites, destroyed the cars, and beat their passengers with sticks.

The Defender also reported that a Black mob took a white peddler off his wagon just before midnight and murdered him.

In contrast, the Chicago Tribune blamed whites, specifically poor and working class whites, for causing the “turmoil” on the South Side, describing mobs of white rowdies who stopped streetcars, pulled Black passengers off, and beat them. The Tribune also reported that gangs of whites gathered on Halsted and State Streets and clubbed any Black people who walked by.

Yet even as the Tribune suggested the city's poorer whites instigated the violence, the paper also faulted Black residents "who added to the racial feeling by carrying guns and brandishing knives," and, the paper said, made the bad situation worse.

Both accounts favored drama over data, but while they confuse more than they clarify, their very contradictions and inconsistencies remind us how hard it is to accurately describe a scene of battle. For that was what a patch of Chicago’s South Side had become.

Midnight Sunday, Eugene Williams was dead, and James Crawford was dying. By 3:00 a.m. on Monday, July 28, roughly fifty Chicagoans, most of them Black, had been injured. Six of the injured (four Blacks and two whites), had been shot. One white shooting victim, Charles Cromier, had been sitting at a window watching a fight outside his house at 2839 S. Cottage Grove when he was struck in the head by a bullet. Twelve more people, seven of them Black, had stab wounds. Many others had been beaten and several, like Joseph Wiggins (Black) and John O’Neill (white), suffered head wounds from the attacks. Six police officers and three fire fighters had been injured as well.

Yet while there were a few reports of incidents as far south as Sixty-Fourth Street, most of the attacks took place between the lakefront and Wentworth Avenue, from Twenty-Fifth to Thirty-Ninth Streets. Inside those borders, in the city's Black Belt, some took cover. J.F. Thomas, the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church at Thirty-Sixth and Vernon Streets, told his Black congregation to go home while it was still daylight and stay inside. Others stood up against the violence by carrying on as usual.

Against the martial sounds of police officers on horseback patrolling the streets, the saloons and gambling dens near State Street did a steady business and the evening services at Chicago's largest Black church, Olivet Baptist, at Thirty-First Street and South Park (now known as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive), went ahead.

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Olivet Baptist Church Under the leadership of Rev. Lacey K. Williams, Olivet Baptist served as a place for Black leaders and the wider community to gather during and in the aftermath of the events of Red Summer. Photo printed in "The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot." The original caption reads "The largest Negro church in Chicago, larger and more modern building, Thirty-first Street and South Park Avenue, purchased recently by Negroes." [Univ. of Chicago Press (1922). Internet Archive.]
Area of violence, July 27, 1919