Chicago Race Riot of 1919

On 27 July 1919, in 96-degree heat, Eugene Williams and some friends took a raft out into Lake Michigan off the 29th Street beach. Chicago segregated its lakefront by custom rather than by law: the beach at 26th Street was white, the one at 29th Street was Black, and Williams drifted across the line. White bathers threw stones at the raft. Williams, who could not swim, drowned. A police officer at the 26th Street beach declined to arrest the man Black witnesses identified, and arrested a Black man instead on a white bystander's complaint.

The fighting that followed ran for a week across the South Side and killed thirty-eight people - twenty-three Black and fifteen white. More than five hundred were injured, and arson left about a thousand Black residents homeless. The deaths were not evenly spread. A mapping project at the University of Chicago, working from Cook County coroner's reports, newspaper archives and the 1922 commission report, found Black casualties scattered across a wide area of the city while white casualties clustered tightly - Black workers were being attacked for leaving their own neighbourhood, with the heaviest concentration along Wentworth Avenue, the western edge of the Black Belt.

Governor Frank Lowden appointed the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, whose 1922 report The Negro in Chicago reinvestigated the deaths and injuries and found that the newspapers had recorded fewer Black injuries than the commission itself could document. About a hundred and twenty-five pages of that report deal not with the riot but with housing: where Black families were permitted to live, and the methods property owners used to keep them out. Those methods - the racial covenant, the mortgage refusal - were federal policy within two decades, and this map carries them as a separate entry for the same South Side in 1940.