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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.

The Angelus

According to the Chicago Tribune, the violence at the Angelus apartment building was sparked when two unnamed Black men called two Chicago cops "white trash." One of the Black men then threw a brick at one of the cops. Then someone else (the Tribune never explained who) fired a shot, which prompted officer Hughes to pull out his gun and open fire. Fifty police officers quickly appeared on the scene, followed by nearly 250 Black men and boys. As the Black crowd gathered, white residents inside the Angelus began to throw bricks from their apartment windows. Then the police began to shoot into the crowd.

In contrast, the Chicago Defender and the New York Times agreed that white residents of the Angelus started the trouble when they threw bricks at two Black men walking down the street in front of the building. When their attack drew a crowd of several hundred Black people, the police were called. Not long after they arrived, officers on horseback fired their weapons into the crowd.
Months later, the coroner's jury investigation into the riots rejected both those versions of the story and blamed the neighborhood's Black residents. Someone, the jury concluded, spread a rumor that a white resident of the building shot a Black child. Police were called to the scene; after searching the building, they reported finding no evidence to support the rumor. These assurances did nothing to allay Black fears; the jury determined that a Black crowd gathered outside of the Angelus. Reinforcements, in the form of more than one hundred patrolmen and twelve officers on horseback, rushed to the area to drive the crowd away. Police efforts to disperse the mob failed; someone fired a shot. That noise startled a police horse, causing it to rear up and throw its rider, Officer Brooks. As he fell, Brooks fired into the crowd, prompting several of his fellow officers to do the same.

No one ever identified the person who fired the first shot. The Tribune hinted that the shooter was Black; the Defender, that it was one of the police officers at the scene. There were also reports of white men driving nearby, firing guns out of their car window at all the Black individuals they saw.

What is certain is how deadly the violence was that Monday evening outside the Angelus. By 8:15 that night, five men were dead or dying. Four were Black. Edward Lee had been shot as he walked toward the Walgreen's drug store at the corner of Thirty-Fifth and State Streets to get some medicine because he was ill. More bullets killed Hymes Taylor, Joseph Sanford, and John Humphrey at almost the same moment. There is no record explaining why any of the three were in the area, though Taylor, who was shot through the back and abdomen, seemed to be leaving when he was killed. Humphrey, who was hit in the head, had apparently been shot by someone above him, either on the nearby L tracks, in the Angelus, or on horseback.

The fifth victim, William Otterson, who was white, had been killed by a brick thrown through the window of the car he was in as it passed by the intersection of Thirty-Fifth and Wabash about ninety minutes earlier.

The bullets fired that night outside the Angelus killed only Black men but prompted the Herald-Examiner to tell its readers that, during the fight at the Angelus, a Black mob of several thousand went to the Eighth Regiment armory four blocks away. Papers reported that after breaking through the doors of that armory at Thirty-Fifth Street and Giles Avenue, the mob seized hundreds of guns and rounds of ammunition.

Commanders of the all-Black Eighth Regiment, an infantry regiment recently returned from France, quickly joined leaders in Chicago's Black communities to deny the Herald-Examiner's claims, but the damage was done.

White Chicago’s stories of the violence at the Angelus that night set the stage for the rest of the riot, as Chicago's mainstream press and police department declared that Black residents were armed and posed a serious threat to the city. From that point on, police used the idea that the Black community was heavily armed to justify arrests of Black men, women, and children, to excuse raids on Black homes, and to rationalize white violence against the Black community. At the same time, as the Herald-Examiner made clear, neither Chicago's press nor its police thought the city's Black citizens had any right to defend themselves.

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People v. Colvin, et al In September 1919, Walter Colvin, Charles Johnson, Frank Coachman, and John Green were brought to the criminal court at 54 West Hubbard Street, just north of the Chicago River, to be tried for the murder of Casmiro Lazzeroni. Although none had criminal records, all four were set to be tried as adults.

When they first appeared in court on September 16, a month after their indictment, Judge Joseph Sabath granted a motion to have John Green and Frank Coachman tried separately from Walter Colvin and Charles Johnson. Then, after Colvin and Johnson entered pleas of not guilty, twelve jurors, all of them white men, were selected to hear the case against them.

Their trial began the next day. James C. O’Brien, one of the stars in the state’s attorney’s office, represented the state, along with a second attorney, John W. Beckwith.

Over the course of the trial, four attorneys, Benjamin G. Pollard, Chester W. De Armond, James G. Cotter, and A.L. Williams, appeared for Walter Colvin and Charles Johnson. Each of the four were Black; all were leaders in the Cook County Bar Association. The forty-eight-year-old Cotter had been an assistant attorney general until he was fired for complaining that Governor Lowden wanted to segregate Chicago after the race riots. Williams, who was forty-one, had monitored the hearings before the coroner’s jury for the Cook County Bar Association.

Chester De Armond, the oldest of the group, was Cotter’s father-in-law. Although he had tried several cases with his son-in-law, he was the least experienced attorney on the trial team, having only finished law school in 1915. But he lived just around the corner from the scene of the murder, at the Angelus Apartments on Thirty-Fifth Street and Wabash Avenue; he was certainly familiar with the area around Thirty-Sixth and State Streets and may have known Colvin or Johnson's families.

The thirty-three-year-old Pollard, the youngest of the four, was a Howard graduate who served as secretary of the Cook County Bar in 1919.
Wednesday Afternoon, July 30 The violence continued.

White individuals hanged a Black figure in effigy at Fifty-First and Halsted Streets. A mob of Black people beat Thomas Ryan, a forty-year-old white man, a few blocks away at Armour Avenue and Fifty-First Street, breaking his nose. Shortly after noon, a white mob attacked a Greek immigrant, Nick Karris, and stabbed him repeatedly at Thirty-First and Federal Streets. Apparently, the mob thought he was Black.

Awhile later, the shoe shine parlor owned by a Black man, J.E. Christen, was burned to the ground. According to the Herald-Examiner, whites had tried to torch the building on Fifty-Ninth Street three other times, finally succeeding on their fourth attempt that Wednesday. Another crowd of whites successfully burned a home occupied by Black residents at Sixty-Eighth and Elizabeth Streets, and there was a fight between Blacks and whites at Aldine Square, near Thirty-Seventh Street and Vincennes Avenue. In the process of subduing that fight, the police raided a Black home, arrested the occupants, and charged them with being snipers.

Although most of the violence took place on the South Side, there were still occasional incidents in the Loop. Around 12:30 p.m., a crowd of whites chased an unnamed Black man down Wabash Avenue. He managed to escape harm when two police officers rescued him. That same crowd then turned on a second Black man, who got away by running into the L station at Congress Street and Wabash Avenue. That afternoon, white messenger boys attacked the Black man employed as a barber by the Board of Trade. The barber was rescued before he suffered serious harm.

George Wilkins, a twenty-three-year-old insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, was the next man to die in the rioting. Wilkins, who was white, had gone into a building at Thirty-Eighth and Rhodes to collect insurance payments from a few of the Black families who lived there. When he left the building around 1:30, he passed by three Black youths. As Wilkins walked down the road, one of the three apparently shot him. The bullet passed through Wilkins’ body; he died not long after in the hospital.

Later that afternoon, there was a fight between whites and Blacks at the Forty-Seventh Street L Station. An unnamed Black man was shot at Thirty-Fifth and Halsted, and William Moore, who was Black, was shot at Thirty-Fifth and Wabash Avenue during yet another altercation at the Angelus Apartments. About a mile away from the Angelus, a white peddler, Agnet Silliman, was attacked by a Black mob after he took refuge with an elderly Black couple at 2733 S. Federal Street. The mob dragged Stillman out to the street, where they shot, stabbed, and beat him with bricks.

There were reports that a woman had been killed by a mob at Forty-Seventh and Indiana, and further south, George Evans and George White, two Black employees at International Harvester’s wagon works factory on Eighty-First Street, were attacked near the factory by a crowd of whites. In addition, the Herald-Examiner reported that two men, Sanford Sanford (Black) and Walter Tenzealso (white), who had been injured during rioting earlier in the week, had died of their wounds. Neither man's death appears on the official report of people killed during the rioting.

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