‘Not the end point’: Markers commemorate lives lost in Chicago Race Riot of 1919
On a sweltering summer Sunday in July 1919, a group of Black teenagers with a makeshift wooden raft unintentionally drifted across an invisible boundary line into an area of Lake Michigan near 29th Street used by white beachgoers.
A 24-year-old white man, George Stauber, threw stones at the teens, causing the drowning death of 17-year-old Eugene Williams. His death and a white police officer’s refusal to arrest Stauber lit the fuse on simmering racial hostility that would explode into what historians have called the most violent week in Chicago history.
In the end, 38 people were killed (23 of the dead were Black; 15 were white), more than 500 were injured, (two-thirds were Black) and at least 1,000 were left homeless.
Now, 105 years after what would be known as the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the first five of 38 planned commemorative glass markers — one for each person killed — will be unveiled during a ceremony Saturday in Bronzeville near the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, at an intersection the Chicago Defender called at the time of the riots the “vortex of violence.”
The public art project is the invention of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project, a group that partners with Bronzeville-based nonprofit Organic Oneness to educate the public about the 1919 riots and their lasting effects on racial segregation in Chicago.
“Maybe once these markers are installed, people (will) start having conversations about this,” said Peter Cole, a Western Illinois University history professor and co-director of CRR-19. “An art marker can’t be the end of a conversation. We hope it will start a conversation.”
‘They weren’t taught it’
Cole said the idea for the markers started with the realization that, in his roughly two-decade teaching career, few, if any, of his students knew about the 1919 riots.
“It’s not their fault,” Cole said. “They weren’t taught it.”
In the years leading up to the July 27, 1919, riots, Chicago’s population of Black residents swelled by nearly 150%, driven by what became known as the Great Migration in which millions of Black people fled racial oppression of the South in search of industrial jobs in northern cities.
Many of these new Black Chicagoans were segregated to a stretch along State Street on the South Side known as the “Black Belt.” White residents near that stretch sought to enforce those boundaries through pressure on property owners and through terror.
The end of World War I exacerbated racial hostility as returning white veterans grew resentful to find jobs filled by Black workers, while returning Black veterans grew increasingly willing to defend themselves against attacks.
By 1919, these outbursts of racial violence targeting Black residents in cities across the country would later be known as the “Red Summer,” the name given by famed writer and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson.
Amid this powder keg came the drowning of Eugene Williams.
According to a narrative on the CRR-19 website, the first police officer at the scene that day, Daniel Callahan, would not arrest Stauber despite witnesses identifying him as the man who hurled stones at the Black teens on the raft. His refusal angered the crowd of Black residents amassing near the beach. As more officers arrived, James Crawford, a Black man, pulled out a gun and shot at police who returned fire, killing Crawford.
The violence spiraled from there. Black people were attacked and shot at and their homes damaged by mobs of white people and white gangs known then as “athletic clubs.” On club called the Hamburg Athletic Club included among its members was a then-17-year-old Richard J. Daley; a WGN report on the 100th anniversary of the riots says the future longtime Chicago mayor never confirmed or denied any involvement in the violence, “but his supporters have said he had no involvement.”
Clashes continued throughout the week as the city’s Black residents, especially war veterans, fought back against those attacks, CRR-19 noted.
In the end, it took rain showers and the National Guard to bring an end to the riots.
Inspiration from Berlin
While the repercussions of the riots continue to be felt to this day, Cole said that history has largely disappeared from the city’s collective consciousness.
In 2019, on the 100th anniversary of the riots, the Newberry Library and other Chicago institutions launched a yearlong effort to “understand a history that frankly has been forgotten, has purposely not been remembered and certainly has not been commemorated,” the library’s director of Chicago studies told the Tribune at the time. “Most historians are kind of appalled by how little is discussed about this moment. There’s a lot of shame in it, really.”
Meanwhile, CRR-19 started to host an annual bicycle tour of historically significant locations in Bronzeville and Bridgeport, while educators began work on a curriculum that now teaches the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 and other acts of racial terror during the Red Summer in all Chicago public school 10th grade U.S. history classes.
Still, one public monument to the riots currently exists: a small plaque on a stone along the lakeshore trail, put there by York High School students in 2009.
Thinking more was needed, Cole said he drew inspiration from a public art project he encountered in Berlin. Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” is a collection of more than 45,000 brass plaques embedded in streets and sidewalks in 17 European countries to commemorate Holocaust victims. Each plaque includes a victim’s name and dates of birth, deportation and death. The plaques are placed at the locations of the victims’ last known addresses.
The public art effort in Chicago has received public and private funding. Last year, it was included among eight new public monuments the city selected to receive grant money — much of it from the Mellon Foundation. Other projects include a memorial to police torture victims and monuments to Mahalia Jackson and Jean Baptiste Point DuSable.
‘Not the end point’
Cole and his co-director at CRR-19, youth violence prevention advocate Franklin Cosey-Gay, turned to Firebird Community Arts to help with the glass markers. Based in East Garfield Park, the organization’s work includes a program called Project FIRE that uses glass blowing as a way to help young people who survived gun violence recover from that trauma.
Firebird artistic director Pearl Dick said 20 to 25 program participants had a hand in creating the markers, which are essentially layers of glass fused into brick shapes.
The first five markers bear the names of five people killed on Monday, July 28, 1919, outside the Angelus apartment building at 35th Street and Wabash Avenue: Joseph Sanford, John Walter Humphrey, Hymes Taylor, Edward Lee and William Otterson (the CRR-19 website includes biographies of each man and information about their deaths).
The glass layers also include images created by the artists. Some of those images come from photographs taken during a celebration the group had last summer at 31st Street Beach.
“They felt pretty firmly that they didn’t want to retraumatize people in the neighborhoods where these (markers) are going. They didn’t want to show the violent imagery that exists,” Dick said. “They wanted to show positivity and growth and hope, solidarity and strength. That was the impetus of using these joyful pictures in that same location, and certainly it was not lost that what they were doing that day got this other young person, not much different from them, killed.”
The contractor who will do the installation picked up the first markers this week, Dick said.
“I think it’s just hitting them the impact that they will be in a permanent installation in their city, in their neighborhood, that their images will literally be there,” Dick said of the artists. “They’re so excited.”
The official public ceremony unveiling the markers kicks off at 9:30 a.m. Saturday and will be followed by CRR-19’s annual free bicycle tour and a bus tour, led by Chicago historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas.
At 7 p.m. July 27, Lookingglass Theatre will hold its annual free public art performance, “Sunset 1919,” near the Eugene Williams memorial marker along the lakefront trail, just north of 31st Street Beach. Looking forward, Cole said he and others envision that space as the future site of something he’s calling Eugene Williams Square, perhaps drawing inspiration from the museum dedicated to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
“Our project is not the end point,” he said. “We’re hoping this stimulates more.”
