How racist propaganda inspired riots in America’s biggest cities – 360 video

Anti-Black racism in school curriculums, newspapers and film set the scene for a week of racial violence in Chicago and Washington DC

Hundreds of miles apart, two of the worst instances of racially motivated attacks in American history occurred within days of each other during the 1919 Red Summer.

Twenty-two-year-old Elsie Stephnick, the spouse of a white, US navy aviator was allegedly assaulted by two Black men near 15th Street NW and New York Avenue on 19 July in Washington DC. At the time, the four major white-owned newspapers, including the Washington Post, were publishing increasingly sensationalistic articles framed to instigate white violence against Washington’s Black community. White veterans and civilians began randomly beating and detaining Black residents in the street and on public transportation. Carter G Woodson, founder of “Black History Month” and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, witnessed a mob grab a Black pedestrian and shoot him to death. “They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him,” Woodson recounted.

Refusing to declare martial law to stop the riot, President Woodrow Wilson eventually relented and activated troops stationed nearby. In the interim, Black people took control of their safety, buying $14,000 worth of weapons to repel white invaders. Guns and ammunition were bought in DC stores, pulled from closets where they had been stored after the first world war, and covertly transported from Maryland. Sharpshooters positioned themselves on rooftops watching for white drivers entering Black neighborhoods, and civilians remained on alert behind partially drawn curtains. By the time troops, and heavy summer rain, stopped the fighting on 24 July, an estimated 15 people were killed – 10 of them white – and 50 people were critically wounded.

Three days later on 27 July, the death of 17-year-old Eugene Williams in Chicago at the hands of George Stauber, a white European immigrant, led to what many historians considered the worst racial unrest of the Red Summer. Floating in Lake Michigan on a 14ft x 9ft raft built with a group of friends, Williams inadvertently drifted into a swimming area near 29th Street unofficially considered to be “whites only”. Stauber spotted Williams in the white swimming area and threw stones in his direction, striking the teen and causing him to drown. The responding police officer, Daniel Callahan, refused to arrest him, despite the protestations of Black beachgoers and onlookers. When a Black officer attempted to do so other white officers prevented him and instead detained the Black witnesses, lighting the spark for mass violence.

Days before the unrest, the lauded poet and journalist Carl Sandburg traveled throughout the city for the Chicago Daily News, noting “where Black people saw opportunity, white Chicagoans saw a threat. Here and there, slowly and by degrees, the line of color discrimination breaks.” The so-called “Black Belt”, a cluster of Black communities on Chicago’s south side, emerged on the border of European neighborhoods. Irish immigrants were resentful of Black workers as they had arrived earlier in the city, firmly establishing themselves politically and economically. As white-Black clashes spurred by Eugene Williams’s death spread beyond the beach areas into residential neighborhoods, “athletic clubs”, which were fundamentally ethnic Irish gangs, were the primary source of violence over the week-long unrest. Future mayor Richard Daley, a president of the Hamburg Athletic Club, allegedly participated.

The first three days of the Chicago riot are considered to have been the most devastating. Black passengers were pulled off streetcars, sidewalks and corners and beaten with pipes and bricks while mobile white assailants, including uniformed soldiers, attacked Black passersby and shoppers in the “Loop” district downtown, killing and severely injuring victims. There was Black resistance as there had been the week before in Washington DC but it was drastically overwhelmed. The violence ended on 3 August when the Illinois governor, Frank Lowden, deployed 6,000 national guard soldiers to the Black Belt to protect Black Chicagoans from white attackers. The human cost was severe: 38 people died, including 23 Blacks and 15 whites, approximately 537 people were injured and between 1,000 and 2,000 families lost their homes, primarily Blacks.

Following the unrest, Governor Lowden convened the “Chicago Commission on Race Relations” to study the roots of the violence and propose solutions. The commission published its findings three years later in “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot”, from the University of Chicago Press. Despite clearly documenting Chicago’s pervasive bias and discrimination against Black residents across housing, criminal justice and education, its suggestions were largely dismissed. And despite the participation of many hundreds of Chicagoans in the 1919 riot, only 47 were eventually indicted.

Red Summers is a 360 video project by the artist and film-maker Bayeté Ross Smith on the untold American history of racial terrorism from 1917 to 1921. The project is funded by Black Public Media, Eyebeam, Sundance Institute, Crux XR and the Open Society Foundations.

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