The commission, which included six white men and six Black, suggested several key issues -including competition for jobs, inadequate housing options for Black people, inconsistent law enforcement and pervasive racial discrimination-but improvement in these areas would be slow in the years to come.
City officials instead organized the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to look into the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them.
Such measures were rejected by African American and liberal white voters, however. In the aftermath of the rioting, some suggested implementing zoning laws to formally segregate housing in Chicago, or restrictions preventing Blacks from working alongside whites in the stockyards and other industries. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to become increasingly militant. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices ran rampant. When the war ended in late 1918, thousands of servicemen returned home from fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern Black people or immigrants. The “Red Summer” of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I. When the riots ended on August 3, 15 white and 23 Black people had been killed and more than 500 people injured an additional 1,000 Black families had lost their homes when they were torched by rioters. His death, and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of Black and white Chicagoans, concentrated on the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. On July 27, 1919, an African American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths.
0 kommentar(er)
