A Look Into the Chicago Race Riots The Civil War was fought over the “race problem,” to determine the place of African-Americans in America. The Union won the war and freed the slaves. However, when President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, a hopeful promise for freedom from oppression and slavery for African-Americans, he refrained from announcing the decades of hardship that would follow to obtaining the new won “freedom”. Over the course of nearly a century, African-Americans would be deprived and face adversity to their rights. They faced something perhaps worse than slavery; plagued with the threat of being lynched or beat for walking at the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite the addition of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Bill of Rights, which were made to protect the citizenship of the African-American, thereby granting him the protection that each American citizen gained in the Constitution, there were no means to enforce these civil rights. People found ways to go around them, and thus took away the rights of African-Americans. In 1919, racial tensions between the black and white communities in Chicago erupted, causing a riot to start. This resulted from the animosity towards the growing black community of Chicago, which provided competition for housing and jobs. Mistrust between the police and black community in Chicago only lent violence as an answer to their problems, leading to a violent riot. James Baldwin, an essayist working for true civil rights for African-Americans, gives first-hand accounts of how black people were mistreated, and conveys how racial tensions built up antagonism in his essays “Notes of a Native Son,” and “Down at the Cross.” In the mid and la... ... middle of paper ... ...2004 http://www.uic.edu/orgs/kbc/ganghistory/Industrial%20Era/Riotbegins.html Givan, Becky. Chicago Race Riot of 1919. 29 Apr. 2004 http://diaspora.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/DiasporaX.woa/wa/displayArticle?atomid=602 New York Life. The History of Jim Crow. 11 Apr. 2004 http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/home.htm Newman, Scott A. “The Chicago Race Riot of 1919.” Jazz Age Chicago. 3 Nov. 2001. 11 Apr. 2004 http://chicago.urban-history.org/scrapbks/raceriot/raceriot.htm “Report Two Killed, Fifty Hurt, in Race Riots.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 28 July 1919. pgs. 1,8. sec.1 Sandburg, Carl. The Chicago Race Riots. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. “Riot Sweeps Chicago.” Chicago Defender. 2 August 1919. pg.1 sec.1 Williams, Suzanne. Carl Sandburg and the Chicago Race Riots. 29 Apr. 2004 http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/ihy970454.html
William Ivy Hair's Carnival of Fury elaborates on the life of Robert Charles and the events leading New Orleans to the race riot of 1900. Hair quoted newspaper articles printed during Charles' life to include society's reaction and provide a white-Southern perspective of African Americans. Hair's original objective was to uncover what Charles experienced during his youth, and discover what prompted him to shoot innocent people from the second floor of 1208 Saratoga St. on July 27, 1900. Although the South vilified Charles and deemed him the catalyst for the race riot, Hair sought to clarify Charles' motives and discover what led him to commit senseless violence.
Civil Rights Digital Library. "Watts Riots." Watts Riots. The Digital Library of Georgia, 20 Nov.
From slavery being legal, to its abolishment and the Civil Rights Movement, to where we are now in today’s integrated society, it would seem only obvious that this country has made big steps in the adoption of African Americans into American society. However, writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin who have lived and documented in between this timeline of events bringing different perspectives to the surface. Du Bois first introduced an idea that Baldwin would later expand, but both authors’ works provide insight to the underlying problem: even though the law has made African Americans equal, the people still have not.
“Heathcote Recalled the Chairman of the Pullman Strike Committee Has More to Tell About." Bismarck Tribune, August 20, 1894, p. 1.
President Woodrow Wilson berated the white race as “the aggressor” in the Chicago riot and efforts were launched to promote racial harmony through voluntary organizations in Congress.
There is some history that explains why the incident on that Chicago beach escalated to the point where 23 blacks and 15 whites were killed, 500 more were injured and 1,000 blacks were left homeless (96). When the local police were summoned to the scene, they refused to arrest the white man identified as the one who instigated the attack. It was generally acknowledged that the state should “look the other way” as long as private violence stayed at a low level (Waskow 265). This police indifference, viewed by most blacks as racial bias, played a major role in enraging the black population. In the wake of the Chica...
The Newark riots of 1967 were very extreme and terrible time in Newark, New Jersey, one of the worst in U.S. history. The riots were between African-Americans and white residents, police officers and the National Guard. The riots were not unexpected. The tension between the city grew tremendously during the 1960's, due to lack of employment for Blacks, inadequate housing, police brutality and political exclusion of blacks from government.
The Chicago riot was the most serious of the multiple that happened during the Progressive Era. The riot started on July 27th after a seventeen year old African American, Eugene Williams, did not know what he was doing and obliviously crossed the boundary of a city beach. Consequently, a white man on the beach began stoning him. Williams, exhausted, could not get himself out of the water and eventually drowned. The police officer at the scene refused to listen to eyewitness accounts and restrained from arresting the white man. With this in mind, African Americans attacked the police officer. As word spread of the violence, and the accounts distorted themselves, almost all areas in the city, black and white neighborhoods, became informed. By Monday morning, everyone went to work and went about their business as usual, but on their way home, African Americans were pulled from trolleys and beaten, stabbed, and shot by white “ruffians”. Whites raided the black neighborhoods and shot people from their cars randomly, as well as threw rocks at their windows. In retaliation, African Americans mounted sniper ambushes and physically fought back. Despite the call to the Illinois militia to help the Chicago police on the fourth day, the rioting did not subside until the sixth day. Even then, thirty eight
The Tulsa race riot changed the course of American history by actively expressing African American views on white supremacy. Certainly I feel with the available facts in this research paper, that the whites were the aggressors for the events leading up to the Tulsa race riot and the start of the Tulsa race riot. African Americans were simply there to stand up against the white supremacy and to provide the African Americans Tulsa their freedom and equal justice.
New York City at the time of the Civil War can be explained as a small roaming forest fire with the potential to cause an exponential amount of damage, not only to the city but the Union. The city, in a state of constant turmoil over a great many things; race, class, politics, and a constantly diminishing amount of available employment opportunities for it’s 800,000 citizens. The riots, which took place in New York between July 13 and July 17, 1863, are called by most, the “New York City Draft Riots.” When in all actuality the enactment of the draft was simply the catalyst to the already engulfing issues that had plagued and divided the city among lines of every distinction. The events over these five days are still widely viewed as the most destructive civil upheaval in terms of loss of life and the “official” number of those who gave their lives in those five days is estimated around 119.
Sellin, Thorsten. "Race Prejudice in the Administration of Justice." American Journal of Sociology 41.2 (1935): 212. Print.
Shaskolsky, Leon. “The Negro Protest Movement- Revolt or Reform?.” Phylon 29 (1963): 156-166. JSTOR. U of Illinois Lib., Urbana. 11 Apr. 2004 .
Phillips, Cabell. “Johnson Offers to Call Up Guard If Wallace Won’t.” New York Times. 19 Mar. 1965: 1+
Wu, F. H. (2002). Yellow: race in america beyond black and white. New York: Basic