White Mobs Attack Chicago’s Black Communities
By noon on July 31, 1919, more than thirty fires had been set in Chicago’s African American neighborhood. Set by angry white mobs, these acts of arson were part of an extended barrage of violence targeting Chicago’s Black community during a summer filled with racial violence in America. This season was dubbed “Red Summer of 1919,” and saw attacks targeting Black communities erupt in major cities throughout the country. The five days of riots and attacks that upended Chicago are widely considered the worst of the Red Summer riots.
The violence began on July 27, 1919, when a 17-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams drowned in Lake Michigan. Eugene and some friends had been swimming at the segregated beach when a white man grew angry that the teens had drifted into the “white side” of the lake. The man threw a rock at the group, striking Eugene in the head, knocking him unconscious, and causing him to drown despite onlookers attempts to save him. This terrible tragedy took place near the start of the Great Migration, a period in which African Americans still living primarily in the southern states were relocating in large numbers to the North and West. Fleeing racial terror lynching, racial discrimination, and economic oppression, millions of Black people left behind their homes and communities seeking, jobs, safety, and the still elusive dream of freedom. Many headed for urban centers like New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago — often to find low-paying jobs, discriminatory treatment, and informal but strict residential segregation policies that relegated them to over-crowded and poor quality housing. Chicago’s Black population nearly doubled between 1915 and 1940; in 1919, that wave was new and growing, and tens of thousands of Black migrants had already arrived. Many white residents of the city saw Black Americans as an economic and social threat.
On May 10, 1919, the Chicago Tribune published a letter to the editor from a 52-year-old white man and Chicago homeowner blaming Black migration — rather than white prejudice or institutionalized racism — for his falling property values. “The blacks came into our neighborhood and the white people are moving out as fast as they can,” the letter read. “My property has depreciated 50 percent. I hate the Negroes on this account; they ruin the property where they live. Wish the whites would organize a protective league to keep the blacks in their place.”
Just weeks later, on July 27th, young Eugene Williams was drowned for being Black. Police responded to the scene but refused to arrest the white man witnesses identified as the rock thrower; instead, officers arrested a Black man at the scene for not following their orders to calm down. Black onlookers who protested this injustice were shouted down and attacked by growing white crowds. Soon, a conflict sparked by the murder of a Black boy became an opportunity for white mobs to act on the tension and anger they felt toward Chicago’s growing Black community. For several days, white mobs terrorized Black Chicago, attacking people and destroying property. The violence continued until August 3rd.
Chicago Tribune | May 10, 1919, Page 12
White Transit Workers Protest Black Workers’ Promotions in Philadelphia.
On August 1, 1944, white employees of the Philadelphia Transit Company (PTC) launched a strike to protest the company’s decision to promote eight Black workers to the position of trolley driver — a job previously reserved for white men. The Black men were promoted after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Orders 8802 and 9436, which prohibited companies with government contracts from discriminating on the basis of race or religion, and required companies to include a nondiscrimination clause in their contracts.
As the United States prepared to enter World War II in the 1940s, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, quickly became one of the country’s largest war production sources. As many as 600,000 workers relied on the PTC to get to their workplaces, including many factories. The strike threatened the entire city’s ability to function, and crippled critical war-time production.
White PTC employees James McMenamin, James Dixon, Frank Thompson, and Frank Carney led the strike, and threatened to maintain the protest until the Black workers were demoted. The strike grew to include over 6,000 workers, prevented nearly two million people from traveling and cost businesses almost $1 million per day.
On the strike’s third day, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to take control of the PTC. Two days later, 5,000 U.S. Army troops moved into Philadelphia to prevent uprisings and protect PTC employees who crossed the picket line. Despite the military presence, the confrontation resulted in at least thirteen acts of racial violence, including several non-fatal shootings.
After more than a week, the strike ended when PTC employees facing threats of termination, loss of draft deferments, and ineligibility for unemployment benefits chose to return to work without achieving their goal of blocking Black workers’ opportunity for advancement. By September 1944, the PTC’s first Black trolley drivers were on duty.
North Carolina Votes to Disenfranchise Black Residents
On August 2, 1900, North Carolina approved a constitutional amendment that required residents to pass a literacy test in order to register to vote. Under the provision, illiterate registrants with a relative who had voted in an election prior to the year 1863 were exempt from the requirement.
These provisions effectively disenfranchised most of the state’s African-American voting population. At the same time, the rules preserved the voting rights of most of the state’s poor and uneducated white residents — who were much more likely to have a relative eligible to vote in 1863, before the abolition of slavery and passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. To the drafters and supporters of the amendment, this outcome was by design.
In the days and months leading up to the special election to vote on the literacy test proposal, campaign events throughout the state encouraged white citizens to cast their votes in favor of the policy that would achieve Black disenfranchisement. On the eve of the election, judicial candidate and former Confederate officer William A. Guthrie proclaimed to a crowd of over 12,000:
“The people of the east and west are coming together. The amendment will pass and the negro curbed in every part of the state. Good government will be restored everywhere. Then our ladies can walk the streets of our towns in safety, day or night. White women will not be afraid to go about alone in the country. We will teach the colored race that our people must be respected. We have restrained and conquered other races. They obeyed our demands or were exterminated with the sword. We are at a crisis. Let us rise to the occasion. Come together!”
The campaign was also marked by widespread attempts to suppress African Americans’ participation in the election. “No negro must vote. All white men must vote,” insisted one prominent politician. “We’ll try to bring this about by law. If that don’t go — well, we can try another tack. The white man must and will rule in North Carolina, no matter what methods are necessary to give him authority.”
The effect of racially discriminatory voting laws in North Carolina and throughout the South would persist for generations, effectively disenfranchising Black people throughout the region with little federal intervention until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Five Days of Racial Violence Leave 38 Dead and 1,000 Black Families Homeless in Chicago
On August 3, 1919, several days of racial violence targeting Black communities in Chicago, Illinois, came to an end after intervention by the state militia. After five days of gunfire, beatings, and burnings, fifteen white people and twenty-three African Americans had been killed, 537 people injured, and 1,000 African American families were left homeless.
During the Great Migration, Chicago, Illinois, was a popular destination for many Black migrants leaving the South in search of economic opportunity and a refuge from racial terror lynching. From 1910 to 1920, the city’s Black population swelled from 44,000 to 109,000 people. The new arrivals joined thousands of white immigrants also relocating to Chicago in search of work. Many Black newcomers settled on Chicago’s south side, in neighborhoods adjacent to communities of European immigrants, close to plentiful industrial jobs. But racism was not completely behind them.
Although African American migrants had fled the Southern brand of racial violence, once in Chicago they still faced racial animosity and discrimination that created challenging living conditions like overcrowded housing, inequality at work, police brutality, and segregation by custom rather than law.
In the second decade of the 20th century, segregation in Chicago was not as legally-regulated as in Southern cities, but unwritten rules restricted Black people from many neighborhoods, workplaces, and “public” areas — including beaches. On July 27, 1919, a Black youth named Eugene Williams drowned at a Chicago beach after a white man struck him with a rock for drifting to the “white” side of Lake Michigan. When police refused to arrest the rock thrower, Black witnesses protested; white mobs responded with widespread violence that lasted five days.
Over that terrifying period, white mobs attacked Black people on sight, set fire to more than thirty properties on Chicago’s south side, and even attempted to attack Provident Hospital — which served mostly Black patients. Six thousand National Guard troops were called in to quell the unrest, and many Black people left Chicago after the terrifying experience.
Though state officials announced a plan to investigate and punish all parties responsible for violence and destruction of property during the unrest, many more Black people were arrested than white. The subsequent grand jury proceedings resulted in the indictment of primarily Black defendants. Later testifying before a commission investigating the roots of the Chicago violence, the city’s police chief admitted this was due to bias in his department of white officers.
“There is no doubt that a great many police officers were grossly unfair in making arrests,” he said in 1922. “They shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.
Missing Civil Rights Workers Found Dead in MississippiOn August 4, 1964, following several weeks of national news coverage and an intensive search by federal authorities, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found in Longdale, Mississippi. The three men, who went missing after being released from a local Mississippi jail, had been shot to death and buried in a shallow grave.
Earlier that year, Michael Schwerner had traveled to Mississippi to organize Black citizens to vote. A white New Yorker working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Mr. Schwerner worked extensively with a Black CORE member from Meridian, Mississippi, named James Chaney. The activist pair led an effort to register Black voters and helped Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a Black church in Longdale, create an organizing center. These developments angered local members of the Ku Klux Klan; on June 16, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney were away, Klansmen torched the church and assaulted its members.
On June 21, Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and a new white CORE member named Andrew Goodman investigated the church burning and then headed for Meridian, Mississippi. Knowing that they were in constant danger of attack, Schwerner told colleagues in Meridian to search for them if they did not arrive by 4:00 p.m. While passing through the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three men were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.
A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Price had been monitoring the activities of the civil rights workers. He arrested the men on traffic charges and held them in jail for about seven hours before releasing them on bail. Price escorted Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and Mr. Goodman out of town, but soon re-arrested the men and held them until other Klansmen could join. They were not seen alive again.
When the three activists did not arrive in Meridian, they were reported missing and soon became the subjects of a highly-publicized FBI search and investigation. As the days turned into weeks, some Mississippi officials and white segregationists accused civil rights leaders of fabricating the workers’ disappearance to gain support for their cause. Once the three men’s bodies were discovered on August 4, however, no one could deny their fates.
While their disappearance resulted in national news stories, Michael Schwerner’s wife and fellow-CORE worker, Rita, admonished reporters in 1964: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” Indeed, investigators searching Mississippi’s woods, fields, swamps, and rivers that summer found the remains of eight African American men: Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who were kidnapped, beaten, and murdered in May 1964; and six unidentified corpses, including one wearing a CORE T‑shirt.
Black Workers Sue Memphis Cotton Gin for Racial Discrimination
On August 5, 2014, three Black men filed a federal lawsuit against the owners of Atkinson Cotton Warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee — a workplace where the men had experienced racial discrimination, harassment, and threats from a white supervisor, and then been fired for reporting the situation. The lawsuit, brought by Untonia Harris, Marrio Mangrum, and Vashone Ford sought anti-discrimination training for all employees and future monitoring of the business environment.
Two months before, Mr. Harris and Mr. Mangrum had filed a federal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reporting that, on a daily basis, African American employees were called “monkeys” and told, “you need to think like a white man.” The complaint also asserted that their white supervisor would yell: “Hey, Black boy, get over there and get my cotton,” and once — according to Mr. Harris — “pulled his pants down in front of us and told us to kiss his white tail.”
Eventually, Mr. Harris began to use his cell phone to record the encounters. On one occasion, when Mr. Harris asked to use a microwave, the supervisor told him he couldn’t, “because you are not white.” In another, the supervisor said about a water fountain, “I need to put a sign here that says ‘white people only’.” When Mr. Harris asked what would happen if he drank from the fountain, the supervisor replied: “That’s when we hang you.”
This discrimination was a direct legacy of the Jim Crow era, and the supervisor was recorded favorably recalling the days of segregation. “Back then, nobody thought anything about it,” he said. “Now everybody is made to where to think it’s bad.”
After the reports of discrimination became public, the owner of the warehouse claimed no knowledge of the abuse and stated that warehouse management outsourced to another company. The management company, Federal Compress, soon reported that the supervisor was no longer their employee, and settled the lawsuit in May 2015.
After Generations of Inaction, U.S. Government Enacts Voting Rights Act
On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. The legislation was the culmination of organized civil rights activism and came after unchecked, systematic voter suppression had targeted African American communities in the South for generations. The VRA outlawed discriminatory barriers to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests, and also imposed strict oversight upon states and districts with histories of voter discrimination. The new law quickly proved extremely effective; Black registration rates soon rose throughout the South and Black officials were elected at the highest rates since Reconstruction. In this way, the VRA directly confronted and addressed a century of racist voting policies.
After the end of the Civil War and the legal abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction Era spawned constitutional amendments that granted citizenship rights to formerly enslaved Black people. The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law, while the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denying citizens the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” By 1877, however, Reconstruction ended, federal authorities largely abandoned their duty to enforce these new rights for Black people, and Southern white leaders set out to use laws and violent intimidation to relegate Black people back to a position of oppression and servitude.
Despite their new Constitutional rights, African Americans seeking to vote faced legal obstacles, threats of economic hardship, and even risked lynching. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, felony disenfranchisement policies, and literacy tests were all passed with the intent of suppressing the Black vote, and enforced in discriminatory ways to achieve that result. For more than a century after emancipation, the majority of Black Americans lived in the South and were largely disenfranchised.
Throughout this time, Black communities and leaders braved great risk to mount registration campaigns and public protests. Many Black people were killed for such activism, but the efforts continued, culminating in the Selma Movement. In March 1965, the nation’s attention turned to “Bloody Sunday”, a widely-televised law enforcement attack on peaceful protesters marching to the Alabama State Capitol to show support for Black voting rights. The violent treatment suffered by activists in Alabama sparked public outcry that helped spur passage of the VRA.
Throughout the 1960s, opponents challenged the Voting Rights Act’s constitutionality, but it was repeatedly upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2013, however, the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder significantly weakened one of the law’s most effective provisions. The decision unleashed a surge in voter suppression measures — including strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls–that are undermining voter participation by people of color
Thousands Lynch Two Black Men in Marion, Indiana
On August 7, 1930, a white mob used crowbars and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young Black men, who had been accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman, and arrested earlier that afternoon. Thomas Shipp, 18, and Abram Smith, 19, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.
During that afternoon, word of the charges against these young Black men spread and a growing mob of angry white residents gathered outside the Grant County Jail. Around 9:30 p.m., the mob attempted to rush the jail and was repelled by tear gas. An hour later, members of the mob successfully barreled past the sheriff and three deputies, grabbed Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith from their cells as they prayed, and dragged them into the street. By then, the crowd totaled between 5000 and 10,000 people — half the white population of Grant County. While spectators watched and cheered, the mob beat, tortured, and hanged both men from trees in the courthouse yard, brutally murdering them without benefit of trial or legal proof of guilt.
As the bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith remained suspended above the crowd, members of the mob re-entered the jail and grabbed 16-year-old James Cameron, another Black youth accused of being involved in the crime. The mob beat Mr. Cameron severely and was preparing to hang him alongside the others when a member of the crowd intervened and said he was innocent. Mr. Cameron was released.
The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hanged from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men’s bodies as souvenirs, before finally dispersing.
Enraged by the lynching, the NAACP traveled to Marion to investigate, and later provided the U.S Attorney General with the names of 27 people believed to have participated. Though the lynching was photographed and spectators were clearly visible, local residents claimed not to recognize anyone pictured. Charges were finally brought against the leaders of the mob, but all-white juries acquitted them, despite this overwhelming evidence. The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, testified years later that she had not been raped.
A photograph of Mr. Shipp’s and Mr. Smith’s battered corpses hanging lifeless from a tree, with white spectators proudly standing below, remains one of the most iconic and infamous photographs of an American lynching. In 1937, an encounter with the photo inspired New York schoolteacher Abe Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit,” a haunting poem about lynching that later became a famous song recorded by Billie Holiday.
The totality of this information was derived from https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/aug/09