The Civil War

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.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was a major conflict that began in Chicago Illinois on July 27, 1919 and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot dozens died and hundreds were injured. This riot was consider the worst riot of the approximately twenty five riots in the Red Summer of 1919, so named because of the violence and fatalities across the nation. The riot of 1919 played an important role in history and it also shocked and divided many Americans.

There was a lot of animosity towards the growing black community of Chicago, which provided competition for housing and jobs. Mistrust between the place and black community in Chicago only lent violence as an answer to their, problems, leading to a very violent riot (Tuttle 17-20). The violence was precipitated by the drowning of an African American teenager who

Williams 2

had crossed an invisible line at 29th Street separating customarily segregated "white" and "black" beaches. Soon, white and black Chicagoans, especially in the South Side residential areas surrounding the stockyards, engaged in a seven-day orgy of shootings, arsons, and beatings that resulted in the deaths of 15 whites and 23 blacks with an additional 537 injured (342 black, 195 white). The police force, owing both to understaffing and the open sympathy of many officers with the white rioters, was ineffective; only the long-delayed intervention of the state militia brought the violence to a halt, and heavenly intervention in the form of rain was probably an important factor as well. The passions of this outbreak were rooted in pent-up tensions surrounding the massive migration of southern blacks during World War I: sometimes hired as strikebreakers, their increased industrial presence was viewed by many white workers as a threat to their own livelihoods, fueling attempts to impose rigid physical boundaries beyond which blacks could not penetrate.

Fig 1.During the Chicago Riot of 1919 Michael N. Marcus / goggle images

Williams 3

In the mid and later 1910's, a mass movement of African Americans from the South to the

cites in the North took place. This is known as the Negro Migration, where African Americans were trying to escape racial persecution and the lack of job opportunities in the South. Many left to the North because it was a place where there are no lynching's a place where they could be safe . The Negro Migration caused the population in the Chicago "black belt" to more than double from 50,000 to 125 , 000 making Chicago have the third or fourth largest black population next to New , York , Baltimore , and Washington (Strausberg 6 ).

The bias in availability for housing was just the beginning of the stresses put on the black community Blacks took places of unskilled laborers, which angered many poor white people in Chicago, since black people would take the same job for less. . Many left to the white people sought to keep Blacks out of their communities (Thomas 45-51). After the War, many white troops coming back to America could not find jobs either because black people had taken most of the unskilled labor. Returning troop had harder times finding skilled labor because they had just been at war and did not have the education for skilled labor. Some came back expecting to get their old jobs back. May of the rioters fighting for the white community