You may have heard about the instigating event of the 1919 Chicago race riot. On Sunday, July 27, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, inadvertently floated across an invisible line into the “white section” of the water at the 29th Street Beach, where he was stoned by a white man and drowned. A week of rioting followed, ending with 38 more people dead and more than 500 wounded.

During the second decade of the 20th century, with the advent of World War I and the Great Migration, Chicago’s Black population grew significantly. There were just 67 Blacks among stockyards employees in 1910, Bates says; by 1919, they numbered 12,000. Their union was part of the Chicago Federation of Labor, which stood for equal pay and nondiscriminatory labor practices, and was led by men who believed (simplistically) that racial problems would disappear if they had a unified labor force. But, Bates says, the CFL’s professed ideals were undercut in part by the policies of its parent union, the American Federation of Labor, which was not particularly interested in organizing unskilled workers and didn’t want to include them in trade-specific skilled labor unions. To get around this, the CFL organized union workers in the stockyards into units based on their residential neighborhoods. In rigidly segregated Chicago that meant that Black and white workers wound up in separate locals. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of Blacks among stockyards union members in 1919 was not robust, and the union wound up exacerbating—rather than eliminating—racial tensions. Forty-one percent of the injuries in the riot happened in the stockyards district. Segregation enforced by murder at the beach was the match that ignited the riot, but Bates argues that years of built-up and festering labor-related racial suspicions, resentments, injustices, and animosities was the fuel that made it burn.

7/25-7/28: Thu-Fri noon-8 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-6 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, 312-943-9090, newberry.org.  F

The 2019 Bughouse Square Debates Sat 7/27, noon-4 PM, Washington Square Park, 901 N. Clark, 312-943-9090, newberry.org.  F