Chicago Race Riot of 1919

Near this spot on July twenty-seventh, nineteen nineteen, a group of Black teenagers swimming in Lake Michigan drifted across an invisible but strictly enforced racial boundary line in the water. White bathers threw rocks at seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams. He drowned trying to stay afloat. When police arrived and refused to arrest the men who threw the rocks, the fury that had been building in Chicago for years finally broke open.

For eight days, mobs attacked Black residents across the South Side. Thirty-eight people were killed, five hundred thirty-seven were injured, and more than a thousand Black residents lost their homes to arson. The riot was one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in American history, part of what historians call the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen, when anti-Black attacks spread across dozens of American cities. The plaque here quotes Martin Luther King: a riot is the language of the unheard.