Race Riot

Portrays the race riot which left 38 dead, 537 wounded and hundreds homeless in Chicago during the summer of 1919.

This reprinting of Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in multimedia: print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, clip art; but mostly text, including hard-luck stories, off-and-on-colour jokes, script-scraps, found letters, free rhymes, drug flashbacks and other scenes, exploring the world of show-biz with feet set lightly in the black humours of the real ol' world. This excretion of the danglers of public life would make William Burroughs sigh and turn the page, at least.

This classic volume of reportage by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and journalist examines the racial tensions that erupted in the Red Summer of 1919. In July of 1919, a black child swam past the invisible line of segregation at one of Chicago’s public beaches. White men on the shore threw rocks at the boy until he was knocked unconscious and drowned. After police shrugged off demands for those white men to be arrested, riots broke out that would last for days, claim thirty-four lives, and burn down several houses in the city’s “black-belt.” A young reporter for the Chicago Daily News, Carl Sandburg was assigned to cover the story. His series of articles went well beyond a chronicle of the violence of the moment. They explored the complex and incendiary social, economic, and political tensions that finally ignited that summer. This volume of Sandburg’s articles includes an introduction by Walter Lipmann and a foreword by Ralph McGill.

Race Riots and Resistance uncovers a long-hidden, tragic chapter of American history. Focusing on the «Red Summer» of 1919 in which black communities were targeted by white mobs, the book examines the contexts out of which white racial violence arose. It shows how the riots transcended any particularity of cause, and in doing so calls into question many longstanding beliefs about racial violence. The book goes on to portray the riots as a phenomenon, documenting the number of incidents, describing the events in detail, and analyzing the patterns that emerge from looking at the riots collectively. Finally and significantly, Race Riots and Resistance argues that the response to the riots marked an early stage of what came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement.

In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. "There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition," remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it. Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

". . . a well-researched and thoughtful inquiry into the circumstances and social forces producing one of the most violent of twentieth-century American race riots." -- American Historical Review "His work fills a serious gap in the history of racial violence in the United States. Never before analyzed by sociologists in the way that the Chicago and Detroit riots were, the East St. Louis riot outranked both as measured by the number of deaths." -- American Journal of Sociology

An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed slaves had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks-and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War, slavery, and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis, Tennessee to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War-era history like no other.

On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the "white" beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture. Archival photos and prints, source notes, bibliography, index.