Race Riots and Chicago in 1919: Project Review
Reviewer(s): Anthony Wheeler
Digital Project: https://exhibits.chicagocollections.org/1919/index
- (Parent Collection: https://explore.chicagocollections.org/)
Review Began: February 16th, 2022
Review Concluded: February 23rd, 2022
Data and Sources
The primary sources collected and dispersed throughout the interactive timeline have been collected from a wide range of archives living throughout the city of Chicago, with a majority of the sourcing coming from the following institutions/collections:
- University of Illinois at Chicago
- Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection
- Jun Fujita Negatives Collection
- Lea Demarest Taylor Papers
- The Newberry Library
- Chicago History Museum
- Chicago Photographic Collection
Processing
This project was born out of a collaboration between the Chicago Collections (the project’s parent organization) members and The Newberry Library, which and leading an [NEH funded] year-long initiative titled Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots, whose mission is to maintain ongoing public discourse about the violence that transpired throughout the city as a result of racially discriminatory policy.
The curation process was conducted by David Greenstein, Lecturer, Special Collections and University Archives, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago, and Megan Keller Young, Instructor and Special Collections Librarian, Special Collections and University Archives, the University of Illinois at Chicago. Timeline entries were written by the following scholars:
- Amara Andrew, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Francesco De Salvatore, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Erin Glasco, University of Illinois at Chicago
- David Greenstein, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Megan Keller Young, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Jonathan Kelley, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Ion Nimerencu, University of Illinois at Chicago
Presentation
The landing page of this collection features an animated opening of the interactive timeline of 1919 Chicago (built using Knight Lab Timelines), with a paragraph description of the project addressing the content of the archive. It states that the timeline is designed to move you through the tense labor conflicts, migration issues, and residual influence from World War I; all of which led up to a week-long racially charged riot. Each section of the timeline provides an image from the described event, accompanied by a specific date and brief description. However, you can click on the event to read more information and see additional primary sources related to said event.
The expanded info pages seem to be built using Esri StoryMaps, granting the ability to have images appear upon scroll and have a rotating slider for documents with multiple pages. Images from archives can also be expanded to learn more about the metadata associated with them. If the user prefers to skip over the timeline aspect, there is a Table of Contents presented at the bottom of the project landing page and it is available to view on every page of the collection by clicking in the corner.
Digital Tools Used to Build It:
Languages
- English
Review
Upon arriving in Chicago for the very first time in 2016, I was perplexed by the ways it rivaled my home city, New York. Their transit system was more streamlined and comprehensible; their access to museums and support from the various universities riddled throughout it, it was inspiring in a way. However, until beginning my Ph.D. in 2020, I hadn’t become overtly aware of the long history/origins of the racial tensions that continue to uphold the stigmatization of the city today. I had gone back to the 1960s to explore the politics around Black education reform in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) (such as the silencing of Black women activists within education and the movement to remove police from CPS), but this project [Race Riots and Chicago in 1919] forced me back further to the turn of the 1920s, exposing pockets of Chicago’s history that I hadn’t seen during my own exploration.
This project does a great job of painting a holistic image of what incited the Chicago Riots of 1919 to transpire, outlining each historical event that can be attributed to the conflict boiling over on what was a segregated beach in July. This includes a full backdrop into how Abolition Laws had a disproportionate impact on low-income communities, highlights of the ways Black soldiers were pawned off to France to fight in WWI (during particularly high-risk situations where high numbers of people were lost)(these same soldiers would become the ones to protect Black civilians from white rioters), the fear and association of progressive racial politics with communism, mob culture, and other historical instances. The first connection this project draws from the past is to the way people have responded to racial tensions today. In 1919, a Black teenager by the name of Eugene Williams was murdered by a white man who threw rocks at him and his friends for swimming on the “white side” of the beach. A rock tragically struck Eugene’s head, causing him to drown. In response to the death of an innocent, hundreds of people flooded onto the beach(es), and violence quickly erupted amongst the dense crowd. This was a catalyst for an even more heated 4-day riot that occurred on 35th Street after the rumor of another young Black victim quickly spread. Thousands of troops flooded into the scene, and we saw police officers react strongly in both scenarios, where shots were eventually fired and more lives were taken.
The United States has a (not so) complex history in terms of what histories are taught within our schools, but this perspective on what transpired is often left out of the discourse for purposes that you can deduce. The Chicago Collection members invested a lot of time scouring these archives to find relevant, citable artifacts that support the erased history of Black American resistance to dominating oppressive entities within the city of Chicago. The riots led to significant housing and labor discrimination that would last a lifetime. Black Americans continued to work in groups to protect the rights of Black Chicagoans, as we see the origins of the formation of groups like the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (similar to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP). Ultimately, I believe this collection functions as it was designed to do so. It’s extremely accessible and contains a wealth of metadata so that people exploring the interactive archive can be brought to the primary source location themselves and learn more about other artifacts within the linked collection(s). The visualization aspect is helpful for readers/reviewers attempting to align the series of conflicts that led to the explosive riots and understanding points in time where there was increased racial tension.
My one and only critique would be that there is a lack of adaptive educational materials. I have created projects with both open digital tools used, JS Knight Lab Timelines and ArcGIS (Esri) StoryMaps, separately. I think combining their respective features to create this digital project was an incredible idea, and I think there would be a lot of benefit to creating an instructor’s guide of sorts into how one might incorporate this digital project into their curriculum as a movement towards anti-racist history education, on top of introducing basic digital literacy skills (both tools come with relatively robust, easy guides to their functionalities). Additionally, I think they could create a template assignment/materials to foster similar projects within educational spaces to create interactive, multidimensional perspectives of our history and various cultures. Lastly, I highly recommend anyone click through this project and learn about the tantalizing history of Chicago’s relationship with desegregation.