Seely 1 Lesson Plan: The Red Summer: An Examination of Urban ...

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Seely 10
Seely 11 The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 After World War I ended in November 1918, thousands of American servicemen, black and white, returned home from Europe and looked for jobs, as many of them had held prior to the war, in the factories, mills, and warehouses of the nation's major industrial cities. White soldiers often sought to reclaim jobs they had held before going to war. Black soldiers, by contrast, expected their status as war veterans to qualify them for jobs they had previously been denied on the basis of race. As the postwar economy contracted, however, the total number of job openings declined. In many cities, whites and blacks found themselves, unhappily, competing for the same jobs. Racial tensions steadily escalated until, in the summer of 1919, race riots erupted in no less than twenty American cities. The largest and most violent of these riots occurred in Chicago. The riot began on July 27, after an African-American youth named Eugene Williams, while swimming with friends in Lake Michigan near 29th Street, strayed into an area informally reserved for the exclusive use of white bathers. For this, Williams was pelted with stones by an unruly group of young white men and soon drowned. When the police ignored eyewitness accounts of the event and refused to arrest those responsible for the boy's death, indignant crowds of blacks gathered in protest. Distorted accounts of the incident inflamed already tense relations between black and white Chicagoans. For the next two weeks, gangs of unruly whites and mobs of outraged blacks clashed with one another in sporadic fighting across the city's South Side. On the fourth day of rioting, the state militia was deployed to restore order, but the fighting continued. In the end, the violence claimed the lives of 38 Chicagoans: 23 blacks, 15 whites. Additionally, over 500 were injured. And hundreds of families lost everything when their homes were torched by rioters. In the wake of some of the worst rioting in the city's history, Chicagoans looked for ways to prevent similar episodes in the future. Some offered quick fixes, including some that would have legitimated racial discrimination in matters of hiring and housing. One proposal called for banning African-Americans from working alongside whites in the stockyards; another suggested that zoning laws be used to formally segregate black and white residential areas. Such proposals, though given much attention in newspapers catering to the city's majority white population, were rejected by Chicago's African-American and liberal white residents. Instead, city leaders and concerned citizens took the occasion to
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Seely 1 Lesson Plan: The Red Summer: An Examination of Urban ...

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