Blood in the Streets A hundred years ago, Chicago experienced the worst spasm of racial violence in the city’s history. Here’s how the riot unfolded, in the words of those who lived it.

Photos: (Lower right) Chicago Tribune Archive; (all others) Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum; Illustration: Michelle Thompson For nearly a week in the summer of 1919, Chicago descended into “a certain madness,” in the words of the city’s leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender. White mobs assaulted virtually any black person they could find on the streets, and blacks engaged in deadly acts of retaliation and self-defense. By the time the violence subsided, 38 men — 23 of them black and 15 white — had been killed and more than 500 people were injured. “Chicago is disgraced and dishonored,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared. “Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. It will take a long time to remove the stain.” Jolting Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration, the riot cast a shadow over race relations in the city for decades. A hundred years later, it remains the worst outbreak of racially motivated violence in Chicago’s history — and one of the deadliest nationally. At the time of the riot, the composition of the city was changing, fueling tensions. From 1910 to 1920, Chicago’s black population grew from about 44,000 to nearly 110,000 — still just 4 percent of the city’s 2.7 million residents — as Southern blacks moved north to flee Jim Crow laws. Previously, most black Chicagoans lived in an area called the Black Belt, from 22nd Street (now Cermak Road) south to 39th Street (now Pershing Road) and from Wentworth Avenue east to State Street. Now they were starting to move into bordering neighborhoods. “Their presence here is intolerable,” the Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners’ Association said in its March 1919 publication. “Every colored man who moves into Hyde Park knows that he is damaging his white neighbor’s property.” Meanwhile, white men returning to Chicago after fighting in World War I found themselves working alongside and competing with black men for jobs in the stockyards and meatpacking plants. In the two years leading up to the riot, bombs were thrown at two dozen homes of black Chicagoans. The police solved none of these crimes. A 6-year-old girl named Garnetta Ellis died in one explosion. And early in the summer of 1919, several attacks on blacks by white mobs were reported on the South Side. “It looks very much like Chicago is trying to rival the South in its race hatred against the Negro,” the renowned black journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in a letter published by the Tribune on July 7, 1919. “Will no action be taken to prevent these lawbreakers until further disaster has occurred?” Twenty days later, her words would prove prophetic. This is the story of the 1919 race riot as told by eyewitnesses. Their words are drawn from official reports, newspaper articles of the time, court records, and historical archives. Several of these passages have never before been published. Some quotes have been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity. Offensive language has been left in to reflect sentiments of the time. Sunday, July 27 “Oh my God!” It was the hottest weekend of the year, with temperatures hitting 95. Chicagoans crowded the beaches, many of them seeking to cool off in Lake Michigan. That afternoon, a black 15-year-old South Sider named John Turner Harris headed for the lake with four of his friends, catching a ride on the back of a produce truck. Harris(in the unpublished transcript of his interview for William M. Tuttle Jr.’s 1970 book Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919): We got off on 26th Street and went to the 25th Street beach. This is where most of the Negroes went. Now, on 29th Street, the white people formed the little beach right behind Michael Reese Hospital. The funny thing is, I didn’t question it. If you don’t want to be bothered with me, I don’t want to be bothered with you. They had their little beach. And they were welcome to come over to ours anytime they wished — and they did, when they wanted some seclusion. We were not allowed over there, because there was always a fight. Nothing I wanted was over there anyway. So we added a colored lifeguard and a colored policeman [to the 25th Street beach]. We were in this little area right in back of the Keeley Brewing Co. and the Consumers ice company. We called it “hot and cold,” because in cleaning out the beer vats, naturally the water was cold. But this water had lime and stuff in it, and it was hot — and Jesus, I would be as white as you when I got done. No women or nothing ever come through, so we didn’t even wear a suit — just take our clothes off and go down on the bank. We’d go up on this little island, then we would put in our little raft. Four different groups of about 20 boys worked on this raft for about two months. It was a nice size — about 14 by 9 feet. Oh, it was a tremendous thing. And we had a big chain with a hook on one of the big logs, and we’d put a rope through that and tie it. We were pushing this raft in the water, not getting too far. None of us were accomplished swimmers, but we could dive underwater and come up. We would push the raft and swim, kick, dive, and play around. As long as the raft was there, we were safe. Chester Wilkins,a black 25-year-old Mississippi native who lived on the South Side (in an interview for Tuttle’s book): There had been bad feelings over there, especially in that swimming area. They wanted to bar the Negroes from going swimming in the lake at all. Kids would always have to collect a group of kids, because if you went individually and run into a couple of white kids, you would end up with a bloody nose. Chicago Evening Post:The trouble started, it is said, when two Negro couples appeared on what is called the “white section” of the improvised 29th Street beach and demanded the right to enter the water there. When refused, according to whites, they became abusive and threatened to return soon with a crowd of their friends and “clean up the place.” Chicago Commission on Race Relations(in its report on the riot): It was not long before the Negroes were back, coming from the north with others of their race. Then began a series of attacks and retreats, counterattacks, and stone throwing. Women and children who could not escape hid behind debris and rocks. The stone throwing continued, first one side gaining the advantage, then the other. Around 3 or 4 p.m., Harris and his friends pushed their raft southeast, passing a breakwater that jutted into the lake at 26th Street and nearing the white area. One of the boys was Eugene Williams, a black 17-year-old Georgia native who worked as a grocery porter. Harris:This Polish fellow was walking along the breakwater. It had to be between 75 and 100 feet from us. We were watching him. He’d take a rock and throw it, and we would duck. As long as we could see him, he never could hit us — because, after all, a guy throwing that far is not a likely shot. One fellow would say, “Look out, here comes one,” and we would duck. It was just like a little game. This went on for a long time. Eugene had just come up and went to dive again when somebody averted his attention. And just as he turned his head, this fellow threw a rock and it struck him on the right side of his forehead. I had just come up, and I could see something was wrong. He didn’t dive — he just sort of relaxed. I went under with him and saw the blood from his head. He grabbed my right ankle. And hell, I got scared. I shook him off. We were in about 15 feet of water at the time, and I had gone down about 10 feet with him. You could see the blood coming up. The fellows were all excited and didn’t know what to do. And the fellow, when he done it, seemed to say something — sounded like: “Oh my God!” The boys watched as he ran back to the confines of this pile of rock right back of Michael Reese.

A mixed crowd gathered at the 29th Street beach in the wake of Eugene Williams’s death. The black 17-year-old drowned after rocks were hurled at him from shore. The incident sparked the racial violence of the subsequent days. Inset: The Defender’s coverage. Photo: Chicago History Museum

The Cook County coroner’s jury, impaneled routinely at the time to decide whether a death required a criminal investigation, had a slightly different version of the event. Coroner’s jury(in its report): We find that Eugene Williams was in the water clinging to a railroad tie, that numerous stones were thrown by the white men in his direction, preventing him, from fear of bodily injury, from landing, being compelled to remain out in the deep water of the lake until he released his hold on the railroad tie and drowned. Peter M. Hoffman,Cook County coroner (in the Tribune): There may have been stones thrown at him, but none hit him, or there would have been a hemorrhage under the skin. Harris:I said, “Let’s get the lifeguard.” So I got a breath and swam underwater till I got to the island, then I got up and ran over to the beach, which is a good block away. I told the head lifeguard — Butch, they called him — and he blew a whistle and sent a boat around. He ran along with me and dove in and went to the raft. The boys were still on it. They were panic-stricken, but they kept their eye on this fellow [who threw the rocks]. This colored cop walked along the shore with me. We pointed the fellow out. He was nervous. So the colored cop went to arrest him, and the white cop would not let him arrest him. There was a big argument between the two policemen. We ran back to the 25th Street beach and told the colored people. In the meantime, the lifeguard had gotten the boy’s body, and naturally all the people were here on this island. Then they came over and demanded that they arrest the man. And this is when the fight started. If the police had been on the ball, nothing would have happened, but they started beating people, clubbing them. I got out of there. Hell, I left my shoes, my hat, and everything. I cut all the way down to 26th Street, all the way down to Wabash. We were putting our clothes on as fast as we were running. Then we caught a bus. The man accused of hurling the stones was George Stauber, a 24-year-old baker. Although Harris remembered him as Polish, Stauber was the son of a brewer who’d emigrated from Bavaria. He lived a quarter mile west of the beach in an apartment on South Cottage Grove Avenue. Theresa Donnelly,Stauber’s daughter (in a recent letter to Chicago magazine): Our dad rarely spoke of his youth. We knew his parents were poor, lived in the South Side near the rail yards, because as a 4-year-old, he — with others — picked up the coal that fell from the passing trains in order to heat their home. His birth mother died when he was quite young, while giving birth to his brother. The infant also died. His father sent for a mail-order bride from Bavaria to raise his children. They had three daughters of their own. My father left school either at 7 or 9 years of age — we are unsure — to apprentice in a local bakery. He cared for his stepmother as she grew severely crippled with arthritis. The white policeman who refused to arrest Stauber was Daniel Michael Callaghan, 38, who’d emigrated from Ireland. Callaghan (whose name is misspelled “Callahan” in many reports on the riot) worked out of the 3rd Precinct police station, a few blocks west of the beach. The black cop who wanted to arrest Stauber was William Middleton, a 35-year-old detective sergeant from Savannah, Georgia, who’d joined the police force in 1911. Middleton(in the Chicago Daily News): I can produce seven witnesses to prove that this man threw the stone. Chicago Commission on Race Relations:Reports of the drowning and of the alleged conduct of the policeman spread out into the neighborhood. A mob of about 1,000 Negroes congregated at 29th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, whence they had chased Officer Callahan. Other policemen attempting to disperse the mob were assaulted. James Crawford, Negro, fired a revolver directly into the group of policemen. They retaliated, and Crawford ran. A Negro policeman followed Crawford, attempting to stop him by firing. Crawford was wounded and died [two days later] on July 29. Monday, July 28 “You’ll be going to Hell’s Valley” Lucius C. Harper,the Defender’s city editor: Excitement ran high all through the day. Groups of men whose minds were inflamed by rumors of brutal attacks on men, women, and children crowded the public thoroughfares in the South Side district from 27th to 39th Streets, some voicing sinister sentiments, others gesticulating, and the remainder making their way home to grease up the old family revolver. Added to the already irritable feeling was the fact that some whites had planned to make a visit to the South Side homes with guns and torches. This message was conveyed to a group of men who were congregated near 36th Street, on State. I elbowed my way to the center of the maddened throng as a man — with his face covered with court plaster — recited the story of his experience at the hands of a mob, which had pounced upon him unannounced at 31st Street and Archer Avenue. Around 4:30 p.m., a 64-year-old fruit merchant named Casimiro Lazzaroni, who’d come to America from Italy in the 1880s, was stabbed to death on State Street, just south of 36th Street. An hour later on the same block, a 31-year-old white Chicago native named Eugene Temple was stabbed to death as he walked out of the laundry he owned. Authorities said the assailants in both slayings were black. Samuel T.A. Loftis,an Irish American diamond merchant (in the Tribune): I had just arrived in the city from a business trip. I heard about the trouble, and thought — because I was a friend of Mayor [William] Thompson and acquainted with many leading Negroes — I could help assuage the race feeling. I got in my car and told the chauffeur to drive south on State Street. At 29th a colored mob was wrecking a pawnshop. I stopped to remonstrate. They fired seven shots at me from a distance of 10 feet. Still, I thought I could get them to listen to me and I halted, but there were eight more bullets whizzing my way. Nearly all hit the auto. At 31st and State Streets about 100 whites were attacking a Negro and his baby. I grabbed him, shoved him into the automobile with his child, and took him to the Illinois Central Depot at 31st Street. “I saw a policeman on his knees, feebly reaching for his hat, which rested on the ground before him. And, as I watched him, he died.” Julius F. Taylor,the editor and publisher of a local weekly black newspaper called the Broad Ax: It was near half past 5 o’clock when we boarded a Racine Avenue trolley headed for home. As the car turned at the corner of Root and Halsted Streets, one member of the hellhounds, standing there waiting for a colored villain, ran up and pulled the trolley, causing the car to stop at the worst and most dangerous place along the whole route. The conductor, being a husky fellow, jumped from his car and dealt him a hard jolt in the jaw. Before the car arrived at 47th and Racine a colored man snaked out from where he had been hiding. And being rather dark, he was frightened almost to death — for no doubt, like ourselves, he felt that the judgment day had come. And as he boarded the car, the white passengers — who seemed to be real friendly — urged him to duck down on the floor between them, so that the leaders of the mob would not detect him. The car rushed around the corner at breakneck speed and made a beeline for 63rd Street. A group of white men and boys armed with bricks chased a black man they had been pursuing for blocks into his house. The man (bottom) was eventually stoned to death. A Herald and Examiner photo caption (inset) said he’d been caught shooting at whites. Photo: (mob) Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum; (victim) Chicago Herald and Examiner White mobs killed four black streetcar passengers that Monday — John Mills, Henry Goodman, Louis Taylor, and B.F. Hardy — and severely beat another 30. A white 19-year-old Bridgeport resident, Nicholas Kleinmark, was stabbed to death by a black streetcar rider, allegedly while Kleinmark was leading a mob attack and wielding a club. Lena Lenocker,a German American woman (testifying in a lawsuit): I seen a car stop right at the corner of 35th and Robey [now Damen] and I seen a man get off with a tool chest, and I saw a mob after him. And as they passed on, I seen it was Mr. Grimes, and they chased him and they hollered, “Get him! Get him! There’s a darky! Get him!” I seen him stumble — and with that I go into the house and call up for the patrol. And as I came out, why, somebody said they had killed him. As it turned out, her neighbor James G. Grimes, a black 31-year-old Chicago native who worked at a clothing store and moonlighted as a piano tuner, survived the attack. Beaten and shot in the head, Grimes, who was married and had a 1-year-old son, was left blind. O.W. McMichael,a member of the coroner’s jury (in its report): Ninety percent of the crowds were mere curiosity seekers. The small, vicious element, finding shelter in the excited crowds, found excuse to vent their impulses to rob and kill, then separate and hide in the crowds or slink away. Chicago Commission on Race Relations:Often the “sightseers” and even those included in the nucleus did not know why they had taken part in crimes, the viciousness of which was not apparent to them until afterward. With minds already prepared by rumors circulating wherever crowds gathered, it was easy to arouse action. A streetcar approaching and the cry, “Get the niggers!” was enough. Counter-suggestion was not tolerated when the mob was rampant. A suggestion of clemency was shouted down with the derisive epithet, “Nigger lover!” Edward Dean Sullivan, a journalist born in Connecticut, had arrived in the city to start a job at the Chicago Herald and Examiner just as the riot was breaking out. He went into the riot zone Monday evening, driven on a motorcycle by circulation manager Dion O’Banion, who would soon become one of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. Sullivan(in his 1929 book Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime): Every window in sight contained six to eight Negro faces. At intervals of every few doorways were policemen, well back in the shelter and peering intently and defensively at the massed faces in the buildings opposite. We drove down State Street, absolutely alone, a one-motorcycle procession. In the distance we could see a vast complement of fire apparatus engaged on a great fire. In our vicinity there was not the slightest traffic in the street, and it was as quiet as though the thousands of Negroes, gazing intently at us from the surrounding windows, were merely masks. John E. Hawkins,a black police inspector (in the Tribune): A band of Negro robbers began looting stores on South State Street. A colored policeman — Simpson, recently returned from the army — attempted to place the men under arrest, and they shot him. Sullivan:As we reached 31st Street, I saw a policeman on his knees, feebly reaching for his hat, which rested on the ground before him. His name was John Simpson of the Wabash Avenue station, and, as I watched him, he died. Simpson, 30, born in Kentucky, had worked as a railroad cook before joining the police force. He would be the only officer killed during the week of rioting. Sullivan:A shot exploded at my ear, fired by my driver, who was gazing intently at a roof above the policeman. Before I even saw anything on the roof, he darted ahead and into an alley. About 20 Negroes, waving, cursing and obviously drunk, were to be seen about halfway down the alley. One, with his back toward us, fired a shot into the air. They discovered us, even as my driver turned abruptly and started back up State Street. “Over 50 policemen, mounted and on foot, showered bullets into the crowd. I decided my best move was to fall face downward.” I took a quick glance at the building before which the policeman lay. On its roof was a Negro, his eyes on us, struggling with a giant Negress, dressed in white. He had a rifle, and was trying to turn it toward us. We veered over the curb on his side of the street and passed along north at lightning speed. Distant guns were popping. The metal bowl of a shovel came hurtling down on the sidewalk a short distance ahead of us. We hugged the curb, jolting along at top speed. At 25th Street and State, a group of police officers and executives were gathered. We drove over to them. “There is a policeman down the street —” I started to say. A police captain looked at me, stony-visaged. “We know all about that. Things are popping. Get that machine out of here as fast as you can.” Seventeen-year-old Arthur G. Falls lived with his parents and eight younger siblings in the Ogden Park area of Englewood, a neighborhood that was mostly white at the time. As a freshman at Englewood High School, he’d been one of only five or six black students. Falls was now attending Crane Junior College and working downtown at the post office with his father, William. Falls(in his unpublished manuscript “Reminiscence,” written around 1962 and archived at Marquette University): No one expected the rioting to spread to our home community. Nevertheless, the one policeman who patrolled the whole area recommended that we all go in at 6 p.m. About 8 o’clock in the evening, we suddenly began to hear shouting from both north and south and learned that we had been surrounded by mobs on 63rd and 59th Street, and more thinly on Loomis and Racine Avenues. We learned also that the stimulating influence in these mobs seemed to be the Ragen Colts, who had roaming bands of youths looking for Negroes to beat up and to kill. Most of us recognized the fact that this meant trouble. Ragen’s Colts, an organization of Irish American teens and young men, started as a baseball team at the turn of the century. While presiding as its boss, former star player Frank Ragen ascended in politics, becoming a Cook County commissioner. The club, meanwhile, purportedly morphed into a street gang — the biggest in Chicago. Its motto was said to be “Hit me and you hit 2,000.” Falls:We learned that the mob intended to come through the area to “burn us out.” The colored people in the area formed patrols to man the alleys. They knocked out all the lights along Ada and Throop Streets and also 61st and 62nd Streets, and lay in wait for the mobs to come in. Most of the colored families were well armed, and numbers of them had had army experience, just having returned in the previous months. As a result, we heard that the one policeman told the mob, “If you go down there, you’ll be going to Hell’s Valley.” In my own home we had only broom handles and the iron poker from the stove to defend ourselves. My father and I stayed up all night — he at the front window and I at the rear. Harper:Hell was yet to break loose, and by fate I was destined to be present. It occurred at Wabash Avenue and 35th Street at 8:10 o’clock. Chicago Commission on Race Relations:Rumor had it that a white occupant of the Angelus apartment house had shot a Negro boy from a fourth-story window. Negroes besieged the building. The white tenants sought police protection, and about 100 policemen, including some mounted men, responded. The mob of about 1,500 Negroes demanded the “culprit,” but the police failed to find him after a search of the building. A flying brick hit a policeman. Harper:Over 50 policemen, mounted and on foot, drew their revolvers and showered bullets into the crowd. The officers’ guns barked for fully 10 minutes. I immediately decided that my best move was to fall face downward to the pavement. Four citizens fell wounded, one a woman. She voiced her distress after a bullet had pierced her left shoulder. A man of slender proportions stumbled over my body in the hurried attempt to escape, and plunged headfirst to the ground. A stream of blood gushed from a wound in the back of his neck. The bullet from an officer’s revolver had found its mark. Blood from his fatal wound trickled down the pavement until it had reached me. The pavement about me was literally covered with splintered glass, which had been torn from a laundry window by the fusillade of shots, and several times I was tempted to brush the broken fragments from my back, where some had fallen, but I dreaded making a move. I arose reluctantly as a cop yelled: “Get up, everybody!” Gunfire had killed three black men — Joseph Sanford, Hymes Taylor, and John Humphrey — but the coroner’s jury could not determine if the fatal shots were fired by police or people in the crowd. A block away, a black man named Edward Lee was killed by what seemed to be a police officer’s bullet as he walked into a Walgreen drugstore. The commanding officer at the scene, Captain Joseph C. Mullen, later testified that he was unaware that any shooting had even taken place. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations stated that it found his testimony hard to believe.



Monday’s violence was still not over, though. At 11:45 p.m., Louis C. Washington, an army lieutenant on a five-day leave, was walking home from an outing to a theater with his wife and four friends — all of them black. They encountered several white youths in the 500 block of East 43rd Street. Washington(in the Chicago Commission on Race Relations report): I heard a yell: “One, two, three, four, five, six!” And then they gave a loud cheer and said, “Everybody, let’s get the niggers!” There were between four and six men. They crossed the street and got in front of us. Just before we got to Forrestville Avenue, about 20 yards, they swarmed in on us. Washington was shot in his leg. Defending himself, he stabbed and killed Clarence Metz, a 17-year-old clerk who lived in Hyde Park. Metz’s father was a horse dealer of German Jewish heritage, and his mother was a child of Irish immigrants. Clarence and four of his friends had originally planned to see a movie that night. Coroner’s Jury:Whether [Metz] was a participant in the riot, or was there out of sheer, boyish curiosity, we are unable to determine. We find that the group of colored people, en route to their home, were acting in an orderly and inoffensive manner, and were justified in their acts and conduct during said affray. Altogether, 17 men were killed in the rioting on Monday.

After fearful black families temporarily relocated from the riot-plagued area known as the Black Belt (now largely Bronzeville), many of their homes were looted and vandalized. Photos: (cart) Chicago Tribune Archive; (house) Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum