The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919

by Carl Sandburg

a selection from the beginning of the first chapter The so-called race riots in Chicago during the last week of July, 1919, started on a Sunday at a bathing beach. A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked for the arrest of the boys throwing stones. The policeman refused. As the dead body of the drowned boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown, on both sides. The policeman held on to his refusal to make arrests. Fighting then began that spread to all the borders of the Black Belt. The score at the end of three days was recorded as twenty negroes dead, fourteen white men dead, and a number of negro houses burned. The riots furnished an excuse for every element of Gangland to go to it and test their prowess by the most ancient ordeals of the jungle. There was one section of the city that supplied more white hoodlums than any. other section. It was the district around the stockyards and packing houses. I asked Maclay Hoyne, states attorney of Cook County, "Does it seem to you that you get more tough birds from out around the stockyards than anywhere else in Chicago?" And he answered that more bank robbers, payroll bandits, automobile bandits, highwaymen and strong-arm crooks come from this particular district than any other that has come to his notice during seven years of service as chief prosecuting official. And I recalled that a few years ago a group of people from the University of Chicago came over into the stockyards district and made a survey. They went into one neighborhood and asked at every house about how the people lived-and died. They found that seven times as many white hearses haul babies along the streets here as over in the lake shore district a mile east. Their statement of scientific fact was that the infant mortality was seven times higher here proportionately, than a mile to the east in a district where housing and wages are different. So on the one hand we have blind lawless government failing to function through policemen ignorant of Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a theory sanctioned and baptized in a storm of red blood. And on the other hand we have a gaunt involuntary poverty from which issues the hoodlum. At least three conditions marked the events of violence in Chicago in July, 1919, and gave the situation a character essentially different from the backgrounds of other riots. Here are factors that give the Chicago flare-up historic 1. The Black Belt population of 50,000 in Chicago was more than doubled during the war. No new houses or tenements were built. Under pressure of war industry the district, already notoriously overcrowded and swarming with slums, was compelled to have and hold in its human dwelling apparatus more than twice as many people as it held before the war. 2. The Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America. It connects directly with a city administration decisive in its refusal to draw the color line, and a mayor whose opponents failed to defeat him with the covert circulation of the epithet of "nigger lover." To such a community the black doughboys came back from France and the cantonment camps. Also it is known that hundreds-it may be thousands-have located in Chicago in the hope of permanent jobs and homes in preference to returning south of Mason and Dixon's line, where neither a world war for democracy, nor the Croix de Guerre, nor three gold chevrons, nor any number of wound stripes, assures them of the right to vote or to have their votes counted or to participate responsibly in the elective determinations of the American republic. 3. Thousands of white men and thousands of...

Genres: History, Race, Nonfiction, African American, Politics, American History

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Free verse poems of known American writer Carl August Sandburg celebrated American people, geography, and industry; alongside his six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939), his collections of poetry include Smoke and Steel (1920).

This best editor won Pulitzer Prizes. Henry Louis Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_San...

Reviews

[Jessica Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

100 years and we still haven’t learned. Black Lives Matter.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for the Popsugar 2020 Summer Reading Challenge in the category of "a book about Black history in America". In 1919 Carl Sandburg (yes, that Carl Sandburg) was a newspaper reporter in Chicago. This book is a compilation of several articles he wrote before and after the Chicago Race Riots in 1919. The articles talk about the migration of Black people from the south to Chicago, the labor situation of these people, and the connection of lynching in the south to the migration to the Chicago area. It is interesting to see a contemporary analysis of the situation which is still pertinent today. 3.5 stars

[Kawabummer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written account of the Chicago Race Riots, the post-war racial dynamics and the discrepancies between the north and the south. Recorded and investigated through the eyes of a poet. Great read.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The truth is there ain’t no Negro problem any more than there’s an Irish problem or a Russian or a Polish or a Jewish or any other problem. There is only the human problem. All we demand is the open door. You give us that, and we won’t ask nothin’ more of you.”

Carl Sandburg paints pictures. The cause of the riots was truly heartbreaking. At the same time it was good to learn about the Chicago migration from the South—something I’ve never studied before.

It was interesting to see that among the factory working men, there was no race problem because they were all working side-by-side.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short collection of articles originally published in the Chicago Daily news in 1919. I stumbled across this copy on a family bookshelf which may have been a book from school days - this edition was printed in 1969.
The preface from the ‘69 reprint may have been the most startling damnation - pointing out how little we had learned as a country since 1919. Reading it another 50 (51) years later in 2020, I have to agree. Amidst 2020 BLM protests — “riots” by some trying to create hysteria — it is a disheartening and validating look at the most basic rights our fellow Americans, Black Americans, have been fighting for since emancipation. A telling read through very simple explorations of race issues in 1919 Chicago — employment struggles, labor unions, real estate, northern migration — that I’d recommend to anyone exploring more Black American history.
Worth pointing out that Birth of a Nation was released in 1915 - and some of the quotes pulled from southern newspapers shared within these 1919 articles bring that baseless, barbaric and racist depiction of Black people around that time *right* to the front of the brain. Unlearn. Unlearn. Unlearn.

[Lisa Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, Lipmann preface kind of confusing. Parent review just because it's pretty harsh, especially the section about lynching, but really ties in a ton of different history elements, good "living history" (really, journalism) source for between the wars.

[Steven Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

6 out of 10

[Ollie_le_clodo · Rating 4 out of 5]

French edition (2016, anamosa)

[Elena Câdă · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compilation of news articles written some years back which makes it for an interesting exercise to see the very contemporary analysis and reaction to the migration in Chicago

[Fred Dignazio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting Articles on the Origin of Chicago Race Riots

This is a remarkable account of race relations in the early 20th century written by an eloquent newspaperman, Carl Sandburg. It is based on detailed research, statistics, interviews, and stories about and by individuals. It is very topical today, one hundred years later, in 2019.

[Tamara Tabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing to learn that Carl Sandburg was not only a fantastic poet, but he also was a news reporter who predicted the 1919 Race Riots. Sandburg went into the Black Belt and interviewed residents to understand their ambitions and frustrations.

[Deborah McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every h.s. student in Chicago should read this book. How can we ever bridge the racial divide without understanding the history in our city.

[Joe Brunory · Rating 5 out of 5]

a short collection of newspaper articles by Carl Sandburg before and after the riots of 1919. a cool headed, realistic view of the real problems behind the race issues ninety years ago.

[Jordan Scrivner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poet's man-on-the-street reportage.

[Pato · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is book number 9 for me this year.