1. For a discussion of Chicago's degeneration into a “biracial society,” see Spear, Allan H., Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 49Google Scholar, as well as StDrake, Clair and Cayton, Horace, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; rept. New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 53, 58–61.Google Scholar Drake and Cayton give a detailed account of the growing tensions between the immigrant and migrant populations beginning in 1915. See also Philpott, Thomas, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, regarding the “extraordinary” degree of segregation in Chicago by 1900.

2. Kerlin, Robert T., The Voice of the Negro 1919 (New York: Dutton, 1920), p. v.Google Scholar

3. For consideration of the varying reliability of journalistic sources, including the Chicago Defender, see Tuttle, William M. Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970)Google Scholar; Grant, Robert B., The Black Man Comes to the City: A Documentary Account from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, 1915–1930 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972)Google Scholar; Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot in 1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).Google Scholar Grossman provides the most languagesensitive study, pausing to assess diction and syntax in competing accounts of the riot and the broader migration and labor issues. In contrast, Lemann, Nicholas's The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar fails to decode the Defender's community-building rhetoric (see, for example, the dismissal of Abbott's “Great Northern Drive” campaign as one of “slogans” and “songs” [p. 16]). If he had met the expectations of his subtitle, he might have “heard” Abbott's variations on a theme.

4. For a discussion of the larger and vexing issues of such reader-response questions, see Radway, Janice, “Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading,” Daedalus 113 (1984): 49–72.Google Scholar Though Radway focuses on the “romance,” she nonetheless offers real insight into the interpretive concerns of audience and reception. In journalism, editors and writers traditionally have presumed that a message sent is a message received.

For consideration of linguistic codes in general, see Fowler, Roger, Linguistic Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 27Google Scholar: “[They] do not reflect neutrality; they interpret, organize, and classify the subjects of discourse. They embody theories of how the world is arranged: worldviews or ideology.”

5. Geertz, Clifford, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983), p. 20.Google Scholar

6. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 271.Google Scholar

7. Grossman, , Land of Hope, pp. 234–36.Google Scholar

8. See Spear, (Black Chicago, p. 115)Google Scholar for documentation of the changes brought about at the Defender by J. Hockley Smiley. Relying primarily on Ottley, Roi (The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955])Google Scholar, Spear claims, “At his most flamboyant, Smiley would not hesitate to invent stories. … By the time of Smiley's death in 1915, the Defender, now audaciously proclaiming itself the ‘World's Greatest Weekly,’ was a hardhitting, flamboyant organ of racial protest well on its way to becoming the first Negro newspaper in history with a mass circulation” (p. 115).

9. Detweiler, Frederick G., The Negro Press in the United States (1922; rept. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1968), p. 65.Google Scholar

10. Park, Robert E., “The Natural History of the Newspaper” in The City, ed. Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W., and McKenzie, Roderick D. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 80.Google Scholar

11. As a newspaperman, James Weldon Johnson was particularly interested in the effects of journalism on race issues (see his “The Negro Press,” in Negro Americans, What Now? [New York: Viking, 1938], pp. 26–33).Google Scholar Park takes a larger view in “The Natural History of the Newspaper.” He sees journalism as the first front of literacy movements for migrants and immigrants alike.

12. Park, , “Natural History,” pp. 94–95.Google Scholar

13. Johnson, , “Negro Press,” p. 31.Google Scholar

14. See Strickland, Arvarh E. (History of the Chicago Urban League [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979], esp. pp. 56–82)Google Scholar, Waskow, Arthur I. (From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections Between Conflicts and Violence [New York: Doubleday, 1966], pp. 38–60)Google Scholar, and Grossman, (Land of Hope, pp. 140–50 passim)Google Scholar for a thorough description of the Urban League's attempts to offset such economic and environmental stresses.

15. An example of such hostile Northern response may be found in Grant, (Black Man Comes to the City, pp. 40–41).Google Scholar From a Beloit, Wisconsin, , News editorial (08 25, 1916)Google Scholar: The Negro problem has moved north. Rather, the negro problem has spread from south to north; and beside it in the South is appearing a stranger to that clime – the labor problem.

It's a double development brought about by the war in Europe, and the nation has not yet realized its significance. Within a few years, experts predict the negro population of the North will be tripled. It's your problem, then, or it will be when the negro moves next door.

Italians and Greeks are giving way to the negroes in the section gangs along northern railroads, as you can see from the train windows, and as labor agents admit. Northern cities that had only small colored populations are finding their “white” sections invaded by negro families, strangers to the town. Many cities are in for the experience that has befallen all communities on the edge of the North and South – gradual encroachment of colored folks on territory occupied by whites; depreciation of reality values and lowering of rents, and finally, moving of the white families to other sections, leaving the districts in possession of colored families with a small sprinking of whites.

This means racial resentment – for the white family that moves to escape negro proximity always carries, justly or not, a prejudice against the black race. It hits your pocket too. …

With the black tide setting north, the southern negro, formerly a docile tool, is demanding better pay, better food and better treatment. And no longer can the South refuse to give it to him. It's a national problem now, instead of a sectional problem. And it has got to be solved, (italics mine)

Within a hundred miles of Chicago, Beloit was already registering the confusion and fear of the white voyeur, looking out at race through a train window. Unlike the battle-royal rhetoric used by Abbott, this editorial inverts the vocabulary of war into one of the siege mentality. The standoff here is between territory held by whites and that threatened by the oncoming “tide” of migrants. The message is not merely one of economics but of classic, class-driven race tensions. The assumption of this editorial is that “negro proximity” alone is enough to incite war between the races.

Crucial to my rhetorical analysis of the riot is an awareness of the larger, regional concern prompted by the first wave of migration. Long before African-American veterans returned home with “continental” expectations, communities ringing the Northern cities impacted by the migration were already bristling with indignation and fear.

Kerlin, (Voice of the Negro, p. 66)Google Scholar cites a Chicago Whip (08 9, 1919)Google Scholar response to the persistent “war” rhetoric:

“Has the Negro Been Fighting for Social Equality?”

We have made an accurate survey of the claims of the new Negro. We have censored his activities since his return from France. And we even aided the investigators of Chicago dailies as they followed the color line. We have gathered first hand information from Washington, DC, as to the feeling of its colored people. WE HAVE YET TO OBSERVE WHERE THE NEGRO HAS MADE ANY FIGHT FOR SOCIAL EQUALITY. … Yet they claim the Negro is fighting for social equality when he buys property in sections where he was a stranger. THEY CALL THIS AN INVASION.

We admit that the Negro is tired of being a “half-man.” We admit that he is tired of the heel of white oppression. We admit that he had been pushed to the wall and even now he stands and shows his teeth. We even admit that the Negro desires social EQUALITY ON THE BASIS OF MERIT. BUT WE CANNOT BE INTELLIGENTLY HONEST AND TRUTHFULLY ADMIT THAT HE HAS MADE ANY FIGHT FOR SOCIAL EQUALITY. HIS FIGHT HAS BEEN A DEFENSIVE ONE. THIS SEEMS SURPRISING AND ALARMING TO OUR WHITE FRIENDS, WHO SEEM TO THINK THAT HE SHOULD BE PASSIVELY SUBMISSIVE. …

Borrowing from the rhetorical strategies of the race and labor press, the Whip, like the Defender, militantly subverts the rhetoric of the mainstream white press. Such rhetorical appropriation was particularly advantageous for minority readers who read both the mainstream dailies and the race or labor weeklies. Such readers and writers got their news from a range of sources.

16. See Johnson, Charles S., “How the Negro Fits into Northern Industry,” Industrial Psychology 1 (06 1926): 399–412.Google Scholar Certainly Grossman, 's Land of HopeGoogle Scholar, with its commanding documentation of family and community kinship networks, would seem to refute Johnson's early, born-of-despair assessment.

17. For consideration of racial politics in the American Federation of Labor, see Tuttle, (Race Riot, pp. 142–56)Google Scholar and Grossman, (Land of Hope, pp. 214–16)Google Scholar; in regard to the Chicago Federation of Labor, see Tuttle, (Race Riot, pp. 110, 124, 135, 145, 200)Google Scholar and Grossman, (Land of Hope, pp. 216, 219, 226, 241–42).Google Scholar

18. The commerce of such national racial tensions lasted well into the 20th Century. A trade card from the Boston Shoe Store, Skowhegan, Maine (ca. 1920, Chicago Historical Society) depicts stereotypes: a pipe-smoking Irish washerwoman gazing out the window at two young street toughs: one black and one white. The caption reads, “Mrs. O'Toole – ‘Give it to im Mickey. T'was for de loikes of sich as him, yer fayther got kilt in the war.’”

19. Regarding Irish rule in the wars, see Drake, and Cayton, (Black Metropolis, p. 62)Google Scholar, Tuttle, (Race Riot, pp. 102–3, 167)Google Scholar, and Grossman, (Land of Hope, pp. 118, 162, 164, 178, 217, 220).Google Scholar See also Baldwin, James (“Introduction: The Price of the Ticket,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 [New York: St. Martin's, 1985])Google Scholar for a comparison of the black and Irish “middle passage” experience:

Later, in the midnight hour, the missing identity aches. One can neither assess nor overcome the storm of the middle passage. One is mysteriously shipwrecked forever, in the Great New World.

The slave is in another condition, as are his heirs: I told Jesus it would be all right / If He changed my name.

If He changed by name.

The Irish middle passage, for but one example, was as foul as my own, and as dishonorable on the part of those responsible for it. But the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking, (p. xx)

20. Barely represented on the city's police force, black police did seem to fall into the “last to be hired, first to go” category. A lead story in the Chicago Tribune “(07 11, 1919)Google Scholar, two weeks before the riot, offers a glimpse into life on duty for the African-American police officer: “COPS' RACE FEUD BRINGS CHARGES AGAINST THREE / COLORED MEN TAKE WHITE ONES' BEDS AND THREATEN THEM.” The front-page follow-up (July 29, 1919): “MERIT BOARD PUTS 3 COLORED COPS ON TRIAL.” By the end of the month, the officers, whose sole offense had been to sleep in beds designated for white officers, had been fired. For blacks' contempt for white police, see Tuttle, (Race Riot, pp. 264–65).Google Scholar

21. Tuttle, Race Riot, p. 49.Google Scholar

22. For an elaboration of his assessment of the role of rhetoric in historical assessment, see LaCapra, Dominick, “Rhetoric and History,” in History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 15–44, here p. 36.Google Scholar

23. Republished in Ottley, , The Lonely Warrior, p. 183.Google Scholar The handbill displayed the Hearst-like banner of the Defender with boldface header – “EXTRA!! / To The Citizens of Chicago.” Each bit of guidance was keyed at the left margin with the following boldface captions (in order): “Your Duty and Mine”; “Keep Off the Streets”; “Riots Mean an Irreparable Loss to Innocent and Guilty Alike”; “This is no time to solve the Race Question”; and “Help The Police Do Their Duty.” See also Waskow, , From Race Riot to Sit-In, “Appendix B,” pp. 308–14Google Scholar: “Posters in Negro Areas during the 1919 Riot” (NAACP ms.), esp. the following one-page broadside issued by the Chicago Whip (August 2, 1919):

PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN.

The riot is over. Let us go back to our work and forget that it ever happened. Your jobs await you; your safety is guaranteed.

But Dont forget the State and City of Authorities who have labored untiringly to give equal protection to all peaceful citizens both white and black. …

Special credit should be given to Chief John J. Garrity, 1st Deputy Alcock, and the entire police force. …

On account of labor shortage, we are not able to get out our normal supply of papers this week. Therefore we reprint at the request of several civic organizations our front page editorial of this week's issue: THE RIOT AND THE HIDDEN HAND. … We admit that there has been a laxity on the part of authorities which in all probability served as an incubator for the growth of trouble.

But the hand which contrived with criminal cleverness to originate the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow car, and other unwholesome organizations and conveyances is ninety per cent responsible for this horrible state of affairs. …

The Whips Dont's for avoiding trouble: Dont forget that interests of white and colored people are so intertangled you cannot harm one to any extent without damage to the other. Dont congregate on corners. Dont carry a chip on your shoulder. Dont allow your sentiment to overcome best judgment. … Dont forget that the good name of Chicago is at stake.

24. Sandburg, Carl, The Chicago Race Riots July 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1919), p. 4Google Scholar (all subsequent citations are given in the text). For a lengthy discussion of the editorial policy of the Chicago Daily News, see Chicago Commission (“Public Opinion in Race Relations,” in Negro in Chicago, pp. 548–49)Google Scholar; also Spear, (Black Chicago, p. 106).Google Scholar

Veterans' issues, prohibition, and labor strife shared front-page space with race issues in the nation's urban press. The Chicago Tribune, the self-proclaimed “World's Greatest Newspaper,” carried near-daily editorials on the “race question.” Returning repeatedly to the twin demands of housing and employment, editors feared what had happened in the nation's capital would soon come to Chicago. Headlines, captions, news stories, editorials, and cartoons conspired to present all African Americans as disturbing, if not utterly hostile, residents. See Tribune (July 22,1919):

[Frontpage headlines]:

Martial Law for Riot in Capital?

5 Dead, Scores Hurt, 200

Jailed; Savage Battle Near White House

[captions]

Negress Kills Detective; Negro Shot Seven Times

[Frontpage; second section … nine-panel political cartoon, entitled: “The Responsibility for the Industrial Unrest”] A man, gesturing to unskilled labor signs, proclaims:

“The restriction of immigration is responsible. We used to get hundreds of thousands of unskilled labor from Europe – men who would do the kind of work the native born doesn't want to do. Now we have no immigrants, haven't had for four years, and may not have for a considerable time more.”

Without showing a single black strikebreaker, the cartoon delivers its message: restrictions upon European workers mean jobs for blacks.

Editorially, the Tribune surmised a lack of understanding between the better elements of both races, and there is only violent expression of resentment on the part of the heedless and ill tempered … [who] have, or at least employ, only one means of expression, and that is violence. Continuance of this sort of expression can only result in recruiting to the aid of each violent factor all those either similarly disposed or by racial instinct inclined to take part. (July 23, 1919) Though the Tribune repeatedly ran stories on the class tensions between the Irish immigrants and the black migrants, it stereotyped only the African Americans. Readers of the Tribune expected dialect and race-biased political cartoons whenever blacks were involved.

25. For a more detailed discussion of Harcourt and its founder Joel Spingarn, see Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 102.Google Scholar

26. Lippmann, Walter, “Introduction” to Sandburg, Chicago Race Riots, p. iii.Google Scholar

27. Detweiler, , Negro Press, p. 152.Google Scholar

28. See Meltzer, Milton (In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro, 1916–1966 [New York: Crowell, 1967], pp. 31–32)Google Scholar, citing The Crisis (10, 1919)Google Scholar article on the Chicago riot. Its writers saw the Daily News as the “exception” to the “prominent style [of Chicago papers with their] … glaring, prejudice-breeding headlines.”

29. See Tuttle, (Race Riot, pp. 103–7)Google Scholar for a discussion of racism in Chicago's dailies; and Wright, Richard, Black Boy (New York: Harper, 1937), pp. 144–45.Google Scholar Wright offers the most damning indictment of such racism:

I told Granny that I planned to make some money by selling papers. … For the first time in my life I became aware of the life of the modern world, of vast cities, and I was claimed by it; I loved it. … The cheap pulp tales enlarged my knowledge of the world I was happy and would have continued to sell the newspaper and its magazine supplement indefinitely had it not been for the racial pride of a friend of the family.

Confronted with the hateful stereotypes in the very paper that he peddled, he could only protest:

“But these papers come from Chicago” … feeling unsure of the entire world now, feeling that racial propaganda could not be published in Chicago, the city to which Negroes were fleeing by the thousands.

However condescending Sandburg's prose may seem, it was positively enlightened in comparison with any of the competing accounts in Chicago mainstream white dailies. Compare this midriot report in the Chicago Tribune (07 30, 1919)Google Scholar:

RIOT REFUGEES / FLEE TO POLICE / FEARFUL OF MOB COLORED CITIZENS / JAM STATIONS; / GO HOME IN CLOSED VANS “Uncle Tom's Cabin” in a modern setting – that was the central police station yesterday. Like fugitive slaves of the antebellum south, colored citizens huddled in the squad room and awaited their turn to be taken home under escort.

All day long they streamed into the station. Some came of their own accord. …

Not far away stood a middleaged colored man whose costume was topped by an old black derby. “No, suh, Ah'm not takin' no chances,” he said. “If Ah was bullet-proof, like one of them there dug-outs, it'd be different. Somethin' tells me Ah better stick right here with the parlice.” A policeman entered the room with a couple of colored men marching before him. “Sit down and we'll take you home just as soon as we get a wagon,” they were told. At long intervals a closed delivery auto from one of the downtown department stores would halt at the curb and the human merchandise would climb aboard. Some of the refugees wore bandages, (italics mine)

Beyond the obvious transformation of citizen or migrant into “refugee” or “human merchandise,” the article breeds contempt in other, more subtle, ways. The policeman, officer of the status quo, is in no way caricatured or even visualized. Where the blacks are drawn as cringing provincials, unlettered and cowardly, the neutral voice of authority sounds merely the letter of the law. Dehumanized and dependent, these citizens have reverted, in the eyes of this journalist, to the condition of chattel slavery.

30. Sandberg, Carl, The Letters of Carl Sandburg, ed. Mitgang, Herbert (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), p. 167.Google Scholar

31. Sandburg, (Letters, pp. 174–75)Google Scholar for two other letters in connection with his dormant racism. On January 3, 1910, Sandburg writes to John Holme (journalist for the New York Evening Post):

The last figures I heard as to the race riot death toll was 35 negro dead and 20 white men. It may be a few, two or three, more or less on either side but that just represents the score. The stories of many niggers being killed and hidden are bosh. It's a dam [sic] hard job to get rid of one corpse in a big city. Corpses stink. One stinks much, ten considerable, and fifty would be awe-ful.

On January 9,1920, Sandburg writes to the Texas folklorist John A. Lomax:

There isn't a man south of the Mason and Dixon line who could reach in and get at me as you do in criticism of the general spirit of my race riot articles. I am sure that no other white man in recent years did so much for me to help get at the way inside interiors of the negro human soul as you did. … You are representative of that part of the South, like Thomas Nelson Page and others, who start with the administration that the negro mind and soul have cultural values. I have not met any man with a keener sleuthing instinct than yourself for these wonderful, vivid singing qualities in the negro soul.

32. Lippmann, , “Introduction”Google Scholar to Sandburg, , Chicago Race Riots, p. iv.Google Scholar

33. Sandburg, , Letters, p. 508.Google Scholar

34. See Spear, (Black Chicago, pp. 39–42)Google Scholar for an analysis of the manipulation of migrants by merchants and packers.

35. New Majority, 08 9, 1919.Google Scholar See Meltzer, , (In Their Own Words, p. 31)Google Scholar for an editorial from The Crisis (10 1919)Google Scholar, substantiating this claim: “With regard to economic competition, the age-long dispute between capital and labor enters. Large numbers of Negroes were brought from the South by the packers and there is little doubt that this was done in part so that the Negro might be used as a club over the heads of the unions.”

36. See Grossman, , Land of Hope, pp. 241–43.Google Scholar

37. Sandburg, , Chicago Race Riots, p. 63.Google Scholar

38. See Lewis, (When Harlem Was in Vogue)Google Scholar for a discussion of the evolution of African-American scholarship and journalism. His consideration of Park and Johnson has informed this essay throughout.

39. For an in-depth discussion of the Johnson-led, Robert Park research team for the commission report, see Waskow, (From Race-Riot to Sit-in, pp. 60–104).Google Scholar With access to the archives of the NAACP, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, and the National Archives, Waskow has pieced together the most complete history of the Commission, its formation, its method, and effect.

40. Waskow, , From Race Riot to Sit-In, p. 88.Google Scholar

41. Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, p. 26.Google Scholar

42. Waskow, , From Race Riot to Sit-In, p. 82.Google Scholar

43. Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, p. 4.Google Scholar

44. Chicago Commission, Negro in Chicago, p. 563.Google Scholar

45. Prattis, P. L., “The Role of the Negro Press in Race Relations,” Phylon 7 (1950): 273–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Arna Bontemps – Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967, ed. Nichols, Charles H. (1980; rept. New York: Paragon, 1990), p. 122.Google Scholar