CHICAGO RACE RIOT OF 1919
With our daily news still sadly filled with stories of racial unrest, we look back at the bloody summer of 1919 and the riots that wreaked havoc in Chicago, starting on July 27. It was a horrific event that lasted for a week, leaving 38 people dead and another 500 injured -- and it was started by a thrown rock.
The 1919 Chicago Riots were started by a gang member from the notorious Ragen's Colts, a mostly Irish bunch from the Stockyards neighborhood.
The Colts dated back to the 1890s, when the Ragen’s Athletic and Benevolent Association started a baseball team, the Morgan Athletic Club. The star pitcher was a rough and tumble Irish lad named Frank Ragen. By 1902, the club had 160 members and held an annual fund-raising minstrel show, a picnic and a ball, which citizen’s reform groups regularly denounced for its debauchery and drunkeness.
The proceeds from the fundraisers, augmented by “donations” from the Democratic Party faithful, paid for a building on South Halsted Street that contained a gym, a ballroom and a pool hall. Ragen beat his way into the presidency of the athletic club and changed its name to Ragen's Colts, which became infamous to the public and the press.
The Colts were notorious racists. They were intent on protecting the white citizens of Chicago against the encroachment of blacks, who they saw as a subhuman threat to white supremacy. On the hot afternoon of July 27, an African-American boy named Eugene Williams was swimming off of the South Side beach and crossed into waters that were designated for "whites only."
From the lakeshore, a crowd of white swimmers began throwing rocks at him. The boy scrambled onto a float until a carefully hurled rock struck him in the head, knocking him back into the water. No one came to his assistance and he drowned. The man who threw the fatal rock, George Stauber, was a member of Ragen’s Colts.
Tensions escalated when a white police officer not only failed to arrest the white man responsible for William's death, but arrested a black man instead. Objections by black observers were met with violence by whites. Attacks between white and black mobs erupted swiftly.
In the ensuing riot, members of Ragen’s Colts -- along with other white area residents -- tore through black neighborhoods with guns, bombs and torches, shooting African-Americans on sight. They bombed and burned homes, looted shops and pummelled anyone who tried to stop them. At one point, a white mob threatened Provident Hospital, many of whose patients were African American. The police successfully held them off.
The Chicago riot lasted almost a week, ending only after Governor Frank Lowden authorized the deployment of nearly 6,000 National Guard infantrymen. They were stationed around black neighborhoods to prevent any further attacks. The Chief of Police, John J. Garrity, closed "all places where men congregate for other than religious purposes" to help restore order. The Cook County Sheriff deputized between 1000 and 2000 ex-soldiers to help keep the peace.
Many white residents of Chicago, ashamed and angry over the attacks on African-American families delivered food and supplies to a line established by the military. The deliveries were then distributed by African -Americans. Industry throughout the South Side closed down during the riots, but the packing plants arranged to deliver pay to certain places in the city so that African-American men could pick up their wages.
The riots ended with 38 people dead (23 African-American, including one black police officer, and 15 white) and another 537 were injured, two-thirds of them African American.
Patrolman John W. Simpson was the only policeman killed in the riot. Approximately 1,000 residents, mostly African-Americans, were left homeless because of the fires. Many black families fled the city by train during the rioting, returning to their families in the south.
Almost forgotten today (or at least rarely talked about) the Chicago Race Riots of the summer of 1919 left a shameful mark on the history of one of the county's greatest cities. We remember it today because, as a man much wiser than I once said, if we do not remember our history, we are doomed to repeat it.
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