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Reviews in American History 29.1 (2001) 165-181



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Race Riot Redux:
William M. Tuttle, Jr. and the Study of Racial Violence

Dominic J. Capeci, Jr.


William M. Tuttle, Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 1996. v + 305 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $15.95.

When Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 appeared thirty years ago in August Meier's "Blacks in the New World Series," it drew rave reviews and several awards. 1 Scholars praised Tuttle for his comprehensive coverage, wide-ranging sources, perceptive analysis, historical contribution, and lucid writing, which pulled readers through a tragic story and found appeal beyond the profession. Gilbert Osofsky, writing in The Journal of American History considered Race Riot "a fascinating and important study, as well researched and written and thought out" as any he had seen in recent years. So did judges who selected it for the Award of Merit of the Illinois State Historical Society in 1971 and the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History in 1972, as well as those of the Society of American History who voted it runner-up for the Parkman Prize. 2 Early in 1972, Tuttle's book came out in an Atheneum paperback edition that remained in print through 1994. It was reissued by the University of Illinois Press in 1996 and enjoys wide classroom use today. As Alan Dawley has put it, the book has had "more lives than a cat." Praise for a fine study when first published is impressive, but one that remains in print continuously for nearly thirty years deserves a closer look.

To begin with, Race Riot is everything that its reviewers say it is. It focuses on race relations in the urban North, one of the era's most important issues set in one of the nation's most important cities. Moreover, Tuttle places it in the broader, national context of socio-economic and political forces unleashed by the First World War and the Red Scare. He dissects the inter-racial strain that exploded into riot, revealing the layered effects of migration, labor, housing, politics, and community-police relations on both races. Blacks, energized by their war experience and expectations for greater opportunity, competed with whites-particularly Irish ethnics-who feared their loss of status in the face of largely rural, southern migrants whose numbers doubled the overall black [End Page 165] population from nearly 50,000 in 1916 to upwards of 110,00 by 1920 (pp. 75-76). As blacks became increasingly assertive, proud, racially aware, and prepared to defend themselves individually and collectively as the 'New Negro' (p. ix), whites viewed them in warlike fashion as internal enemies challenging the color line. Tuttle also links the legacy of racism with intergroup conflict over everyday resources during the Red Summer of 1919, so-named because of the blood spilled nationwide in twenty-five riots between April and October of that year. Thus, he explains Chicago's bloodshed in readily understandable terms of its past having converged with the wartime experience to pit the races against each other over "gut-level animosities" and "gut-level issues" (pp. viii, 261). Ironically, neither race placed faith in the police or municipal government to support their aspirations and, significantly in the case of blacks, protect their lives. As individual slights and violent acts accumulated simultaneously in contested workplaces, neighborhoods and political campaigns, blacks and whites generalized their hatred for each other until an incident sparked the riot that came all too easily on July 27, raged for 5 days, and left 23 blacks and 15 whites dead and 537 people--mostly black--injured (pp. 10, 64, 242).

In providing this persuasive explanation of the underlying forces of Chicago's upheaval, Tuttle writes vividly, often gracefully and in prose that showcases oral history and social science theory without compromising exciting narration or incisive analysis. In storytelling and interpretation, he presents history as literature...

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