Carl Sandburg and the Chicago Race Riots

Suzanne Williams
Geneva High School, Geneva

During the summer of 1919, Chicago was in a racial uproar. Carl Sandburg, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, ventured into the heart of the battle to acquire a first-hand knowledge of the city's racial problems.

Racial discrimination had become worse across the country that year. Chicago, along with other cities, such as Washington, D.C., and Omaha, was experiencing greater racial tensions than ever before. In July, the Daily News asked Sandburg to write a two-week series on the racial disturbances in the Black Belt, a predominantly black Chicago neighborhood. Sandburg accepted the assignment and spent the next few days in the Black Belt, talking to residents to learn about their feelings.

In his investigation, Sandburg centered on everyday life in the Black Belt, searching for where the racial tensions began. Blacks in the South had heard that better jobs and more racial tolerance were to be found in Chicago and began flocking to the city. In just three years, from 1916 to 1919, the population of the region climbed from 44,103 to 190,594. Not enough housing was built to accommodate the massive growth, and the homes that were occupied by blacks were often bombed. White men and boys formed hate groups. Armed with brass knuckles, guns, and clubs, they raided black neighborhoods, beating and sometimes killing blacks.

A crowd gathers at the Twenty-ninth Street Beach, the site of the stoning and subsequent drowning of Eugene Williams. The incident touched off the Chicago Race Riot.

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Carl Sandburg, a young newspaper reporter in Chicago when the race riots began, focused, his articles on the evils of racism.

Much of the violence across the country that year was aimed at the black soldiers returning home from war. This was also true in Chicago. Black World War I veterans returned to a different city. There were no jobs, and there was much more discrimination. There were no more opportunities for those men who had been across the sea fighting for a country that hated them. Sandburg learned of this and wrote about one situation. A black soldier, William Little, had just arrived home in Blakely, Georgia, and was walking to his house when he was stopped by a group of whites who ordered him to take off his uniform and walk home in his underwear. Fortunately for Little, a group of sympathetic bystanders talked the group into allowing him to continue home in his uniform. Because he had no other clothes, Little wore the uniform everyday, angering the group of whites who had stopped him. Days later, William Little was found dead, still wearing the only clothes he owned.

Sandburg's articles were thorough. He had educated himself on the situation and seemed to understand the plight of blacks. He felt that black women were at the greatest disadvantage. They were the last to get a job, taking the jobs that white women refused, and were not paid much for the work they did. In his column, Sandburg wrote that blacks were not going to tolerate the way they were being treated by whites, and that violence would erupt in their mission for equal rights. He was correct when he said this, for Chicago was about to experience one of its worst riots ever.

On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a black youth, accidentally drifted into white waters at the beach. Upon noticing Williams, whites on shore, who were already fighting with a group of blacks, began to throw stones at him. While desperately trying to swim back to his own side of the beach, Williams disappeared into the water, and did not surface again until his body was recovered from the bottom of the lake nearly an hour later. When a white police officer refused to arrest the white man who had hit the boy with a stone, blacks became enraged and began to riot.

The rioting continued all day, and before the night was over, blacks had stabbed five whites, shot one, and beaten four others. Whites did even more damage. They injured twenty-seven blacks, stabbed seven, and shot four. The violence did not stop there. Riots continued through the night and into the next day. Whites attacked blacks coming home from work, and pulled them off trolleys and beat them in the streets. Finally, on July 29, heavy rains fell over the city, and the fighting ceased.

The Chicago Race Riots were tragic. In all, fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were left dead, more than five hundred people were injured, and nearly one thousand blacks no longer had a home in which to live. Sandburg could not believe what he had witnessed. In an article about the riots he quoted a black union official, "It's working people killing each other, that's all there is to these race riots." The whites were working people just as the blacks were working people. Perhaps that was what Sandburg was trying to point out. He interviewed black shopkeepers, preachers, housewives, factory workers, and many other blacks who were working people. He conducted interviews with leaders who said that blacks were just as smart at whites. They worked even harder in that they had to struggle to prove that they were equal to a race who believed it was superior.

Sandburg was not afraid to look at what was happening in Chicago through the eyes of the blacks. He took chances and wrote what he felt was true. In his articles on the race riots, Sandburg informed the people of Chicago on what was happening around them. He tried to prove that blacks and whites were equal, even though most people did not agree with him. Carl Sandburg's efforts are to be commended, for he was one of the few people who tried to help the blacks as they struggled in a racist world.—[From Joseph Haas, and Gene Lovitz, Carl Sandburg: A Pictorial Biography; Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg, Helga Sandburg, A Great and Glorious Romance.]

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