This guide provides information and links to websites that detail the many racially inspired slaughters of African Americans in the United States of America by those considered white Americans.
"The origins of the Chicago race riot of 1919 are to be found, not in high-level policy, but in gut-level animosities between black and white people who were generally inarticulate and presentist-oriented, and who did not record their motivations or feelings for posterity. . . To explain the Chicago riot, this evidence has to be found; and though such evidence is not abundant by any means, it does exist."--From the preface
On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the "white" beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture.Archival photos and prints, source notes, bibliography, index.
"On July 27, 1919, an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans, concentrated on the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. When the riots ended on August 3, 15 whites and 23 blacks had been killed and more than 500 people injured; an additional 1,000 black families had lost their homes when they were torched by rioters."-The History channel
Calls for reform in the wake of the 1919 Chicago race riot came to centre on the perceived need for greater order and oversight in the relations between the black and white residents of the city. This article examines the city's official response to the racial violence of 1919, which took the form of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations and its 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago. Demand for the interracial commission emanated from both progressive reformers and official political channels but many among Chicago's African American population resisted the undemocratic and segregationist implications of such a deliberating body. I assess the nature of the political ideas animating the commission's membership and the intellectual sustenance provided by its primary researcher, Charles S. Johnson, and his mentor, Robert E. Park. I argue that the report not only institutionalized Jim Crow in 1920s Chicago but by giving official sanction to racial marking, it embedded racial categorizations in the newly emerging conceptions of citizenship in the modern city.