The Nineteen Nineteen Race Riot, Red Summer at the Beach
Near Chicago Lake Michigan, Illinois
On July twenty-seventh, nineteen nineteen, a seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan at Twenty-Ninth Street Beach. The beach was segregated by custom and by force, the Black section and the white section divided by an invisible line in the water. Williams drifted, or was carried by current, across that line. White bathers on the other side threw rocks at him. He drowned.
A Black man on shore identified to police the white man who had thrown the rocks. The police refused to make an arrest. A Black man was then arrested for an unrelated complaint. The confrontation that followed was not a riot in the spontaneous sense. It was organized, at least in part, by white athletic clubs, Irish-dominated gangs with political connections to South Side ward bosses, organizations with names like Ragen's Colts, whose members had been attacking Black workers and Black neighborhoods for weeks that summer as competition for jobs intensified after the war.
About a week of violence followed. When the count was made, thirty-eight people were dead: twenty-three Black and fifteen white. Five hundred thirty-seven people had been injured. More than one thousand had lost their homes to arson and mob destruction.
The riot of nineteen nineteen did not begin the pattern of residential segregation on Chicago's South Side. That pattern already existed in real estate deeds, bank loan refusals, and the threat of violence. What the riot did was fix it. The areas that were Black and the areas that were white after the riot stayed that way for the next half century, maintained by the same mechanisms and the same threat. The redlining that locked Black Chicagoans out of home loans, the deed restrictions that barred Black families from white neighborhoods, the highway placements of the nineteen fifties that demolished Black communities while protecting white ones: these were the long aftermath of what happened in the water at Twenty-Ninth Street on a hot afternoon in July.
