Previous articleNext article FreeNightmare on 35th Street: Commemorating the Chicago 1919 Race Riots at the Vortex of ViolenceFranklin N. Cosey-Gay, Peter Cole, Myles Francis, Sydney Lawrence, and Antoinette RaggsFranklin N. Cosey-Gay Search for more articles by this author , Peter Cole Search for more articles by this author , Myles Francis Search for more articles by this author , Sydney Lawrence Search for more articles by this author , and Antoinette Raggs Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreStolpersteine for the Feder family in Kolín. Photo: Francisco Peralta TorrejónView Large ImageDownload PowerPointCemeteries often are sites of collective trauma resulting from horrible events that, unfortunately if not surprisingly, society seeks to suppress. In July 2019, one hot and humid day, Sydney Lawrence and Antoinette Raggs, two One Summer Chicago students interning at the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention (CCYVP), scrolled through the death records of victims of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots inside the office of Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. Why did these students go to a southwest collar suburb of Chicago to explore gravesites of African American victims of a deadly race riot? Ironically, Black southern migrants of that era, desperately seeking to escape de-jure segregation in the south, found themselves constrained by the painful realities of de-facto segregation in the north. Chicago proved no exception. There, Blacks quickly learned that racist societal norms and practices dictated where they lived, learned, and worked—and even where they could be buried. Established in 1911, Blue Island’s graveyard was among the few cemeteries for Black Chicagoans to bury, mourn, and memorialize their dead. As Dr. Damon Arnold lamented about segregated cemeteries in Chicagoland, “Not only did we bury people’s bodies there, we buried our history there.”The students’ internship aimed to increase their knowledge of the history, geography, and impacts of the 1919 race riots which left 38 dead and 537 injured and remains the worst incident of racial violence in Chicago history—yet remains largely forgotten. With the assistance of a cemetery administrator, the student interns and their supervisor, Dr. Franklin N. Cosey-Gay, CCYVP Executive Director, located a few gravesites of African American victims of the riots including Eugene Williams, the first victim. Finding Williams’s grave was easy due to the hard work of Black history activist Tammy Gibson and cemetery staff. They had spent months locating his unmarked grave and in July 2019 found it, just in time for the centennial of his murder which sparked the riots. Subsequently, Gibson and other concerned stakeholders, including the co-directors of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19), contributed to funding a tombstone to memorialize Williams properly. The ghost of Eugene Williams, who might have haunted the cemetery’s grounds, may finally come to rest in Chicago’s largest segregated graveyard.Finding locations for other riot victims’ graves, an equally grisly task, took longer. While paging through records to locate burial sites, the students serendipitously noticed the names of many others who died that same year. Like the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, before their internship the students did not know of the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans and 50,000,000 people globally.Lawrence and Raggs were not alone. Every fall semester, Dr. Peter Cole, a history professor at Western Illinois University, asks his students about the worst event of racial violence in Chicago’s history. In 20 years of teaching at this public university that enrolls many from Chicago and its suburbs, almost none can name the 1919 Chicago Race Riots. Similarly, when discussing World War I, he asks them to guess the primary cause of death among U.S. soldiers and sailors during the war; very rarely does anyone correctly answer the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Despite its massive death toll, and like the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, the influenza pandemic never was memorialized, its centenary roundly ignored, and was only rediscovered in 2020 with the emergence of another global pandemic. Yet, both the 1919 race riot and flu pandemic played pivotal roles in the stigmatization and containment of Black Chicagoans, a gruesome reality that persists to this day. The omission of horrible aspects of U.S. history, particularly its long history of racism and violence, represents a collective failure that continues to harm us. The pervasive racial inequalities in Chicago and across the nation are measurable in countless ways. The failure to have a reckoning with 240 years of slavery, 100 years of formal segregation, and another 50 years of racism have been revealed, once more, in the May 2020 killing of George Floyd and the rebellion it sparked. The words of Czech writer Milan Kundera aptly summarize America’s historical amnesia of racism and its legacy: “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”Over the past few decades, however, German public artists have served as a harbinger for how a society can confront its ghastly history. Time spent in German cities reveals a panoply of monuments, statues, parks, and museums dedicated to remembering and “owning” the Holocaust, despite its horrors. CRR19 takes inspiration from German memory culture, particularly German artist Gunter Demnig’s ongoing Stolpersteine project.In 1996, Demnig embedded 20 small brass plaques in the sidewalks of Berlin near the last-known residences of Jewish Holocaust victims. Inscribed in the plaques were biographical details of each victim. Demnig coined the installations “Stolpersteine” which translates to “stumbling stones.” Unlike statues or signs, typically set aside of the sidewalk flow, the stones break up the monotony of the pedestrian’s path with bronze “stones” designed so that a person metaphorically “stumbles” upon them and, hence, reminded that one or multiple Holocaust victims lived at that location. These stones instantly connect the present context with the ghostly victims of past times. Instead of denying these ghastly events, a huge demand for these stones spread across dozens of German cities and towns as well as more than 20 other European countries. Stolpersteine’s popularity confirms the need to confront the past. Presently, there are over 75,000 stones with thousands more scheduled for installation.Cole himself first stumbled upon Stolpersteine while living in Berlin in the summer of 2016 and quickly was captivated by the power of these seemingly subtle markers (Fig. 1). Walking the German capital’s streets, Cole sought out Demnig’s markers and ruminated on the stark contrast between Germany’s intentional remembering of the Holocaust and his country’s ongoing refusal to reckon with its own 400 years of racism. Spending more summers in Berlin, by 2018 he was contemplating a comparable project to Stolpersteine in order to attack America’s willful amnesia about racism.Fig. 1. Stolpersteine of Martha Liebermann, wife of the artist Max Liebermann, in the Pariser Platz 7, Berlin-Mitte. Photo: Richard C. SchonbergView Large ImageDownload PowerPointAs a long-time Illinois resident and part-time Chicagoan, Cole decided he might create something similar to Stolpersteine to commemorate the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. That is, create historical markers for each of the 38 people killed in 1919—installed at the locations where they were killed. For, despite being the city’s worst incident of racial violence, it remains almost entirely absent from Chicago’s landscape and collective memory. Just as public art helps recover the identities of victims of the Holocaust, CRR19 could do the same for the race riot in Chicago.The near-total absence of the 1919 race riot from the city’s memory is all the more nightmarish considering it played a major role in creating the city’s notorious, persistent residential segregation. Chicago often is described as two cities—one white and one with people of color, but few know that segregation expanded and hardened in response to the 1919 riot. A serving of “Chicago-style” stumbling stones could contribute to unburdening the individual and community-level stigma associated with living in marginalized Black communities while helping more resourced and largely white Chicagoans understand the roots of systemic racist practices and policies in housing, education, economics, health, and justice and its present impact on the communities of color in their city.In fall 2018, Cole started to develop the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project. Central to the CRR19 mission is raising awareness of past horrors by installing artistic markers at the locations where all 38 people (23 Black, 15 white) were killed. He appreciated that the first step demanded collaborating with community stakeholders and civic leaders. Although discussing the riot’s root causes, impact, and the need for commemoration was important, describing the ways structural inequities persist in Chicago also were essential to engaging collaborators.Cosey-Gay was among Cole’s first collaborators on CRR19. Since 2015, he has directed CCYVP which aims to reduce and prevent violence in Chicago’s greater Bronzeville community through the development of a community-led, coalition-based, community action plan. Led by principal investigator Dr. Deborah Gorman-Smith (Dean of the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago) and co-investigator Pastor Chris Harris (CEO of Bright Star Community Outreach or BSCO), CCYVP coordinates with over 70 community partners that represent a diverse set of stakeholders—from school leaders and residents, to government and civic leaders, to nonprofits and businesses. These groups convened to support the implementation of the Greater Bronzeville Community Action Plan (GBCAP) across four sectors: 1) high-quality programs for youth and families; 2) trauma-informed care; 3) workforce development; and 4) education equity. In January 2019, Cole had the chance to discuss CRR19 at a meeting of Bronzeville Community leaders, Cosey-Gay included. Aptly enough, this meeting occurred at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ where, in 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley and thousands of other Black Chicagoans attended the open casket memorial for her son Emmett Till, brutally murdered by white men in Mississippi a few months prior. Like Eugene Williams, Till’s only “crime” was being a Black male.In April 2019, at the behest of GBCAP coalition leaders, Cosey-Gay joined Cole as co-director of CRR19 to leverage existing relationships within this collaborative network and gather community support for the project, which planned to officially launch on July 27, 2019, the precise centennial of Williams’s murder. The purpose of the launch was two-fold: commemorate the race riots and announce CRR19’s aim to install historical markers at the locations where all 38 individuals were killed 100 years prior.Community engagement and collaboration with credible community stakeholders have guided this process. Since 2009, thanks to the leadership of now-retired teacher Mike Torney and his small team of nine York High School students, there is a historical marker that memorializes Eugene Williams and the 1919 Chicago Race Riot near the location where Williams was killed. Since its installment, each year, the Bronzeville Historical Society (BHS) conducts a libation ceremony to honor his death, reflect on the riots, and raise awareness of the persistently high rates of Black youth violence victimization. In addition to BHS’s annual event, Chicago’s Newberry Library launched a multi-part series of Red Summer programs throughout the 2019 centennial. CRR19 felt it essential to mobilize as wide an audience as possible so sought to coordinate these myriad events.With our guiding principles in mind, we convened these and other groups to create a harmonious series of events on the 100th anniversary of Williams’s death. Thanks to the leadership and congeniality of members from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Office of Community Engagement, the Bronzeville Historical Society, Go Bronzeville, Slow Roll Chicago, Greater Bronzeville Community Action Council, the 3rd and 4th Ward Alderman offices, Good Kids Mad City, Organic Oneness, the Community Builders at Oakwood Shores, the DuSable Museum, Newberry Library, Chicago History Museum, Public Narrative, and Bright Star Community Outreach, we coordinated and created programming, literally from sunrise to sunset, as a “Day of Remembrance” (Fig. 2).Fig. 2. Poster for the CRR19 Project’s “1919 Race Riots Day of Remembrance to Heal Our Community.”View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe day-long commemorative events began with CRR19 leading a historic bike tour through the Bronzeville, Bridgeport, and Canaryville communities with bike marshaling assistance from local groups, Go Bronzeville and Slow Roll Chicago. Along with about 40 cyclists, Cole and Cosey-Gay stopped at historically important and relevant locations and ended near the city’s lakefront to connect riders to the BHS annual libation ceremony at the Williams historical marker (Fig. 3).Fig. 3. Franklin N. Cosey-Gay discussing the significance of the Victory Monument, seen in the background, during CRR19’s 1st annual historic bike tour. Photo: Elise Schimke, courtesy of Another Chicago Magazine.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointRiders then pedaled to IIT’s student union, an architectural gem designed by Rem Koolhaas, for a continental breakfast while the VanderCook College of Music’s One City Jazz Orchestra—composed of predominantly Black 5th to 8th graders—played songs from Bronzeville’s rich jazz history. The program featured vital leaders and youth groups endorsing the CRR19 mission, including remarks by Aldermen Pat Dowell (3rd ward) and Sophia King (4th ward), and Pastor Chris Harris, as well as a keynote address by architectural critic Lee Bey. The program also included youth who had participated in One Summer Chicago and After School Matters with BSCO, CCYVP, and Public Narrative. They presented their efforts to commemorate Chicago 1919, which included: oral history interviews with elders, photovoice documentation of present-day sites of those slain in 1919, and visual art projects (see Fig. 7, below). They were followed by a powerful speaker from the Black-youth, anti-violence group, Good Kids Mad City (GKMC). The program concluded with Cole, who briefly discussed Stolpersteine and the vision to use public art to commemorate Chicago 1919. Then he encouraged everyone to attend the day’s other events. Later, back at the 31st Beach, Cole and Cosey-Gay, along with his family, participated in performance artist Jefferson Pinder’s Float project, sponsored by the DuSable Museum, Chicago History Museum, and the Chicago Park District. Pinder’s hour-long event involved 100 people floating in innertubes, symbolically and powerfully re-enacting Eugene Williams’s final minutes (Fig. 4). That was followed by GKMC programming featuring speakers, spoken word, and a beach concert.Fig. 4. Jefferson Pinder’s performance art piece Float, July 27, 2019. Photo: Emily Schimke, courtesy of Another Chicago Magazine.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointIt seemed fitting that 12 hours of programming ended at the beach, where diverse participants engaged in commemoration activities in the water and sand. One hundred years ago, five Black teenage boys had similar aspirations. Alas, their makeshift raft drifted into a “white-only” part of the lake, and tragedy struck when a white man threw rocks leading to the drowning of Eugene Williams. That crime was compounded by a white police officer’s refusal to arrest the white perpetrator. The failure of police to protect Black people remains a through-line of Chicago history. Although fitting to end commemoration activities near Williams marker, that noble effort, by itself, has done little to raise awareness of the history and legacy of racial violence in Chicago. On multiple occasions, Cole has talked with people looking at the plaque who knew nothing about the history and did not fully understand the memorial.CRR19 seeks to address this knowledge gap by increasing the awareness of the context surrounding the riots beyond the incident at the lakefront. Black migrants were not only settling into segregated and overinflated housing in Chicago, but also into a familiar pattern of cultural, physical, and structural violence experienced in the south. Prior to the riots, Blacks quickly learned that violent acts perpetrated against them, including dozens of fire bombings, were received by the so-called justice system with “ambivalence and vitriol.” The injuries and deaths connected with these injustices as well as Williams’s death further insulted the Black community whose men served, fought, and died during the “Great War.” Across the United States in 1919, a “New Negro” movement of Black pride, empowerment, and resistance was sweeping the nation. In Chicago, Black men who had “returned from fighting” in France found themselves fighting white ethnic gangs euphemistically labeled athletic clubs—aided by Chicago police officers and “machine politicians.” Clubs like the Hamburg Boys and Ragen’s Colts used the purported and actual acts of Black resistance to engage in extra-legal, violent acts including drive-by shootings and mob attacks in the Black Belt and workplace districts (Fig. 5).Fig. 5. Victim being stoned and bludgeoned during the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-065493; Photo: Jun FujitaView Large ImageDownload PowerPointThroughout 2019, before and after the “Day of Remembrance,” CRR19 has focused on education. Cole and Cosey-Gay have delivered more than 30 presentations to middle school, high school, and university students, community and religious groups, inmates, and more. Talks always highlight events after Williams was killed, i.e. the 101-year legacy of racism and violence. They continue to mobilize and coordinate with community stakeholders, civic leaders, and local youth through schools and street outreach intervention organizations.In 2020, despite facing an uphill battle amid the Covid-19 pandemic, CRR19 aims to install its first set of markers—commemorating the five deaths (4 Black, 1 white) that occurred on July 28 near the (now-razed) Angelus Building along 35th Street between State and Wabash. During the riot, the Chicago Defender named this intersection the “Vortex of Violence” because 34 percent of riot-related violent incidents occurred within those nine blocks.This violent epicenter is particularly appropriate because of the institutions and its legacies that align and shape the 35th Street corridor in the heart of Bronzeville, where the violence began and was its worst. Near Michigan Avenue lies the Chicago Police Department Headquarters and De La Salle High School. De La Salle educated five Chicago mayors including a father and son who accounted for nearly a half-century of city governance: Richard Michael and Richard Joseph Daley. In 1919, Richard J. was 17 years old like Eugene Williams but Daley also belonged to the Hamburg Boys, one of the “murderous packs” that terrorized the Black Belt and used violence to maintain all-white communities. One block east, at 3435 S. Indiana, was the Defender’s first office. For 40 years, at this location, the Defender brought awareness to Black injustices to a local and national readership while uplifting Black pride that still is manifested in the annual Bud Billiken Parade, the country’s largest African-American parade and which celebrated its 90th birthday in August 2019. A few blocks farther east on 35th stands the Chicago Military Academy, previously home to the all-Black Illinois 8th Infantry Regiment, and at 35th and Martin Luther King Drive sits the Victory Monument honoring the Black soldiers who served during World War I. All of these structures typify the forces empowering and inhibiting Black freedom. We strongly believe that a comprehensive understanding of the present and past mechanisms of structural violence begins with the 35th Street corridor. We are also mindful that the individuals and communities most impacted by the intergenerational transmission of traumatic violence experiences should be central in the design of the artistic markers. This guided us to connect with members of Firebird Community Arts and its trauma-informed arts initiative, Project Fearless Initiative for Recovery and Empowerment (F.I.R.E.). Project FIRE combines glassblowing, mentoring, trauma psychoeducation, employment, and leadership opportunities for Chicago youth injured by violence.CRR19 has begun partnering with Project FIRE to design a series of durable glass structures that will be incorporated into the 38 markers (Fig. 6). Designs will be presented to community stakeholders to help select the best proposal. The initial installations at 35th and State will provide a vivid connection between past and present interpersonal and structural violence as well as demonstrate the collective healing power of art.Fig. 6. Project FIRE youth glassblowing at Firebird CommunityArts Studio. Photo: Pearl DickView Large ImageDownload PowerPointThus far, CRR19 has raised $14,000 through donations and crowdfunding campaigns as well as a modest grant from Illinois Humanities, which financed last year’s launch and this year’s 2nd annual historic bike tour. We presently seek further funding and support from the arts community as we grow our network, develop needed resources, and execute the installations.As we continue to seek support and funds, we have set ambitious goals of installations across two phases. The first phase will focus on locations of killings that, today, have a high density of residents, businesses, and sidewalk activity. These locations include Bronzeville, downtown Chicago, and Little Italy. In each location, we will partner with one or multiple local stakeholders to be good stewards of the installation. Our aim is to install the first wave prior to Memorial Day 2021, in time for the centennial of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 in which some 300 African Americans were killed. The second phase will require more ambitious community partnerships because the remaining locations have suffered the most from weakened structural conditions including economic loss, population loss, and abandonment. One hundred years later, the themes of racism and structural violence remain much the same. Today’s cry against police misconduct reverberates in the Movement for Black Lives and the mantra “No Justice, No Peace,” echoing Claude McKay’s explicit message in his poem, “If We Must Die.” The nexus of racism and structural buffers also remain, a straight line drawn between the 1918–19 influenza and the 2020 Coronavirus pandemics. Structural racism, which has ceaselessly inflicted trauma on Black Americans, was yet again revealed in the disproportionate impact of the current pandemic on Black communities. Structural barriers and racially motivated misinformation campaigns compounded the loss of Black lives in the 1918–19 influenza outbreak. They also ensured that history repeated itself in 2020. Like so many horror classics, Corona 2020 feels like a familiar albeit distressing sequel to Influenza 1918–19.One hundred years ago Blacks “were spared,” with lower incidences of influenza than other races. However, those Blacks who did contract the flu were more likely to die due to structural inequities in housing and healthcare. In 2020, the all-too familiar themes of inaccessibility to healthcare resurfaced in the disproportionate number of Covid-19 infections and deaths occurred in the Black community, in Chicago and nationwide.Current events related to Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter have heightened interest in and indicate a growing readiness to confront Chicago’s racist history which are the origins of current structural inequities. CRR19 is well-positioned to engage youth in “action civics” by creating opportunities to increase youth awareness and engage in discussions on the long-overlooked history of racial violence. In 2019, CRR19 pioneered such engagement with One Summer Chicago youth interviewing elders, taking photos of the locations of the deaths and visiting the burial site of Eugene Williams and searching for other victims’ graves (Fig. 7).Fig. 7. As a component of her photovoice project, One Summer Chicago student Sydney Lawrence superimposed her 2019 photo, taken at the intersection of 35th and State Streets, with Jun Fujita’s “Vortex of Violence,” taken at the same location, in the aftermath of five fatalities on June 28, 1919.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAlthough the coronavirus will prevent a redux of such programming in summer 2020, the explosion of rebellions after George Floyd’s murder resonate deeply with CRR19. Most powerfully, perhaps, are images from a Chicago protest on May 31st when people marched three miles from the Loop to Bronzeville. Their goal was the Chicago Police Department Headquarters on 35th Street—the precise location where five people were killed in 1919 at the “vortex of violence.” On this recent Sunday, a dramatic standoff occurred right at the intersection of 35th and State, where Chicago Police officers built a line of defense, supplemented by massive snowplows from the city’s Street and Sanitation Department, to contain Black people and their allies. This confrontation dramatically reminds us that the struggle for equity, like 100 years ago, crosses through 35th and State, still the heart of Bronzeville (Fig. 8).Fig. 8. Black Lives Matter Protest, May 31, 2020, 35th and State Street, Chicago, where police set up a blockade near CPD Headquarters. Photo: Evan Garcia/WTTW NewsView Large ImageDownload PowerPointCRR19 is aptly motivated to use this same space so that pedestrians, including CPD officers, “stumble” across monuments designed in part by recent victims of violence, to remind Chicagoans of the injustices of the past and the ways inequities presently persist. This particular location will capture people walking west to a nearby White Sox game or classes at IIT or east to De La Salle, the Chicago Military Academy, Urban Prep High School, or Doolittle Elementary. It will be seen by people going to or from the CTA’s Green Line station at that exact location. It will be seen by CPD officers who work across the street. It will be seen by people simply going home.We no longer can accept amnesia, omission, and denial as a strategy toward building a more just society. We aspire to serve as a national example of truth and reconciliation. To conclude this essay, we return to Lincoln Cemetery, where Williams and a few other Black people killed in the Chicago 1919 riots also are buried. This cemetery is yet another example of the ongoing impact of de facto Jim Crow. The true crime of this city and country being that, even when we remember historical atrocities, we still mourn separately. What greater horror in a country that boasts of the equality of all its people? Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Portable Gray Volume 3, Number 2Fall 2020 Published for the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711994 Views: 478 © 2020 Franklin N. Cosey-Gay, Peter Cole, and the University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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