A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield (review)

On a sweltering July Sunday in 1919, a bunch of buddies skip church and head for the beach to cool off. They're black, and they know better than to stray the few blocks toward the beach that is the de facto stake of white bathers, but when their homemade raft drifts too far in that direction, the teen boys find themselves pelted with stones; taking a knock to the head, one kid goes under and drowns. That blame falls swiftly on the victims is no surprise, but the ensuing days of rioting on the city's South Side are initially unexpected. Hartfield argues in this vivid history, however, that the signs were there all along, both in the overwhelming presence of Jim Crow laws and proximate causes peculiar to turn-of-the-century Chicago. Racism surely fueled the event, but here Hartfield focuses on its accelerants: overcrowding in Chicago's "Black Belt" following the Great Migration during World War I years of labor shortages; black anti-union sentiment following sellouts by past union organizers; ethnic community boundaries impenetrable as stone walls; an Irish street gang with a genesis in anti-Irish discrimination; and most insidiously, manipulation of the stockyards workforce—black and white—by the packinghouse owners. Drawing together social, political, economic, and geographic themes, Hart-field's discussion will be best appreciated by readers with some basic background in labor and immigration issues, although close-ups of such major players as Ferdinand and Ida Wells Barnett and Gustavus and son Louis Swift put human faces to this sweeping drama. Period illustrations help set the scene; notes, bibliography are also included the bound book will include a map and an index. EB