ABSTRACT
On July 27, 1919, a dash of whites and blacks at a Chicago beach resulted in the drowning of a Negro boy and served as the spark to what was to remain the most violent racial outbreak in American history until 1965. For four days black and white mobs were virtually uncontained and it was almost another week before the state militia was able to withdraw, on August 8. The final toll read 38 dead (23 black, 15 white), 537 injured (of whom two-thirds were black), and 1000 people homeless (primarily whites). Less than two weeks after the end of the rioting Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois appointed a 12-member Commission on Race Relations “to study and report upon the broad questions of the relations between the two races.” The hearings and research, which the commission began three months later, occupied them for an entire year; the greater part of 1921 was spent in writing the 672-page report, which appeared in 1922 as The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. The commission was most fortunate in selecting for its major investigator Charles S. Johnson, a young graduate student at the University of Chicago, who decades later was to produce a number of classic studies of the American Negro. Thus the 1919 Chicago riots resulted in a significant analysis of the events themselves, as well as of the sociological structure of race relations and of a northern black community, which served for decades as a model of social science.
