Opinion | How a Brutal Race Riot Shaped Modern Chicago

“The relation of whites and Negroes in the United States is our most grave and perplexing domestic problem.” So wrote the authors of “The Negro in Chicago,” a landmark 1922 study of a race riot that ripped through that city a century ago this summer. That conflagration, which began on July 27, consumed the city for three days and left 38 people dead and 537 injured. Whites set fire to scores of black-owned houses, leaving a thousand African-Americans homeless.
For several nights, gangs of white youth rampaged through black neighborhoods, targeting blacks who defended themselves by sniping back from behind makeshift street barricades. On Monday, July 28, the worst day of violence, white rioters pulled blacks off streetcars at busy South Side intersections and beat them with planks, pipes, bricks and fists. The next morning, a roving gang of whites, including soldiers and sailors in uniform, swept through the downtown streets of the Loop, killing two blacks and injuring many more. Large portions of the second-largest city in America became battlegrounds for open race war, which only rain and deployment of reserve guardsmen managed to quell.