The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot

In the summer of 1919, seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams drowned after being stoned by white swimmers at a segregated Chicago beach. What followed was five days of violence that left thirty-eight people dead and hundreds more injured, exposing the explosive racial tensions simmering beneath America's urban surface. This meticulously documented 672-page investigation represents the first major governmental inquiry into race riots in American history, assembling statistical data, eyewitness testimonies, and public opinion analysis to understand what sparked the bloodshed and how similar violence might be prevented. The Commission confronted an uncomfortable truth: the riot emerged not from spontaneous hatred but from the pressures of the Great Migration, economic competition, and a city systematically divided by race. Published in 1922 with recommendations that went largely unheeded, this volume remains essential for understanding how racial violence became embedded in American urban life and why that history still echoes today.