Chicago Race Riots

People

Eugene Williams

Outcome

unknown

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was one of the deadliest episodes of the "Red Summer," lasting eight days from July 27 to August 3, 1919. The violence was sparked by the murder of Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old Black youth who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him near a segregated beach, and the subsequent refusal of police to arrest the killer. By the time National Guard troops and steady rainfall restored order, 38 people had been killed—23 Black and 15 white—and over 500 were injured. Between 1,000 and 2,000 residents, most of them Black, lost their homes to arson and destruction. The riot was distinguished by the organized nature of white violence and the unprecedented armed self-defense mounted by the Black community. White youth gangs known as "athletic clubs"—including Ragen's Colts, the Hamburg Athletic Club, the Aylwards, Our Flag, the Standard, and the Sparklers—drove through Black neighborhoods in automobiles, firing indiscriminately at residents. The Hamburg Athletic Club's membership included a 17-year-old Richard J. Daley, who would later become mayor of Chicago. Ragen's Colts, led by politician Frank Ragen, had nearly 3,000 members and the vigilante slogan "Hit me, and you hit 3,000." In one incident, members of Ragen's Colts donned blackface and set fire to Lithuanian and Polish homes in the Back of the Yards in an attempt to incite immigrant communities to join them against African Americans. On Saturday, August 2, forty-nine houses burned west of the stockyards in suspected arson. Black Chicagoans, including World War I veterans, organized armed resistance. On Tuesday, July 29, Samuel Johnson fired defensively from his porch, killing white rioter Berger Odman and scattering the mob. The violence spread from the South Side's Black Belt to nearby white ethnic neighborhoods and the downtown Loop. Police bullets killed at least five Black victims, yet no white officers faced charges. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations later acknowledged that "the colored people suffered more at the hands of the white hoodlums than the white people suffered." Governor Frank Lowden deployed the militia, which withdrew on August 8. He also created the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, composed of six white and six Black members, to investigate the causes. The Commission's 1922 report condemned segregation as "impracticable" and documented discrimination across all institutional sectors. However, as Ida B. Wells later noted, "many recommendations were made, but few, if any, have been carried out." The criminal justice response was deeply inequitable: despite Black residents comprising roughly two-thirds of casualties, they represented two-thirds of the 138 persons indicted. Only three people were convicted of riot-related killings—all young Black males. Walter Covin and Charles Johnson, convicted of murdering merchant Casimiro Lazzaroni, claimed police beatings coerced their confessions; both received sentence commutations in 1933.