Remembering the Chicago Race Riot of 1919

I began the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19) to address historical amnesia and fight racism. Despite its impact, few know of the worst incident of racial violence in Chicago history—a week of violence that killed 38 people and injured 537 others. Further, this event greatly contributed to the subsequent expansion and hardening of residential segregation that still shapes Chicago. Having taught US history in Illinois for two decades, I can say no one knows this history. Yet how could such a pivotal moment be "forgotten"?

In recent years, I had the good fortune to spend three summers in Berlin, where I was shocked by the many monuments, museums, and other sorts of public reckoning with the Holocaust. By contrast, the silence of America's public spaces—regarding the genocide of Indigenous peoples and enslavement of Africans—is deafening.

One German public art project particularly affected me: Gunter Demnig began Stolpersteine, translated as Stumbling Stones, in the 1990s. He places small brass plaques into sidewalks outside the last known residences of Holocaust victims. These subtle reminders are so impactful that, now, there are eighty thousand (and counting) across thirty countries in Europe.

I founded CRR19 to apply the idea of Stolpersteine to Chicago: install markers into sidewalks at each location where a person was killed in 1919. In so doing, the hope is to educate people and confront them about the legacy and relevance of racial violence.

Turning my idea into reality is another story! As a white person primarily living in "downstate" Illinois, I knew I needed local "buy-in," especially from the Black community. I started networking with Chicagoans I knew: historians and others engaged with African American studies as well as the Chicago Teachers Union, a sister local to my own in the American Federation of Teachers.

I was most fortunate, one wintry day in early 2019, when I presented to the Greater Bronzeville Community Action Council (GBCAC). While talking to a group of thirty mostly Black people in the neighborhood where the riot began, in the very church where Emmett Till's legendary open-casket memorial was held, I met Dr.

Figure 1.

At the Vortex of Violence, 35th and State St. Chicago. Photo courtesy of Barry Feldman.

Franklin Cosey-Gay, a born-and-bred Black Southsider and public health professional. GBCAC endorsed CRR19 and insisted that Cosey-Gay become codirector, a most fortunate outcome!

Since then, we have presented on the history and legacy of 1919 as well as our public art vision to more than twenty-five groups at universities, schools, and religious and community groups. We formally launched CRR19 on the centennial of the riot's start, joined by more than two hundred people. We have conducted multiple historic bike tours and raised almost $70,000 to create the markers. We now partner with a local arts organization—which trains youth victims of violence in glass-blowing as art therapy—to create our markers. We met with local aldermen and city officials to seek support. We have published essays in the Chicago Tribune and journals in Chicago and Berlin.

CRR19 centers labor and working-class matters. All those killed and injured were working-class. While white elites, soon thereafter, used restrictive covenants to contain Black Chicagoans, white working-class people had deployed extralegal violence. Our tours visit the Union Stockyards Gate to discuss how economic tensions contributed to growing tensions, while also highlighting interracial union organizing. We also highlight housing issues in (still) predominantly Black and white working-class neighborhoods, connecting past and present.

We've made great progress, but COVID has temporarily caused the city to go silent as it handles other pressing issues. We've already reached several thousand people, quite possibly many more via our writings and social media. We continue to organize presentations and tours as we continue planning for creating thirty-eight markers to be embedded in the streets of Chicago. When that happens, people will have no choice but to remember that—from the Loop to the near Westside and the...