MIDAFTERNOON ON SUNDAY, as news of Fitzgerald’s confession filtered through the sweltering city, five teenage boys from the Black Belt decided to grab their bathing suits, hop a passing produce truck, and take a ride to the beach. Temperatures were already reaching ninety-six degrees, and the boys knew a special place on the lakeshore where they could escape the heat without their parents finding out about it. Just offshore near the foot of Twenty-sixth Street was a little island they called “the Hot and Cold”—named for the contrasting effluents of a brewery and an icehouse nearby. It was an ideal playground. Located roughly halfway between the crowded Twenty-fifth Street beach (touted by one black weekly as the race’s answer to Atlantic City) and the equally crowded white beach at Twenty-ninth, the island was private and unsupervised by adults.

When the truck slowed to cross the streetcar tracks at Wabash and Twenty-sixth Street, the boys hopped off and headed straight east toward the lake. They didn’t linger, for this was the territory of an Irish gang that had thrown stones at them on several occasions in the past. Today, however, the boys were able to travel unmolested. Before long, they crossed the Illinois Central tracks and made their way around the Keeley Brewery to the shore. Quickly changing into their bathing suits, they waded across the shallows to the Hot and Cold. Here they’d hidden a large homemade raft built from logs and railroad ties scavenged in the area. According to one of the boys—a fourteen-year-old named John Harris—they liked to attach a rope to the raft and tow it out into the deep water, where they could practice diving and underwater swimming while having the makeshift lifeboat to hold on to if they got tired. Today their goal was to tie up at a post standing in the water several hundred feet offshore. And so, at about two o’clock, the boys pushed off from the island and began steering the raft eastward and southward into the lake.¹

What the boys did not know was that a fight was developing at this very moment at the Twenty-ninth Street beach a few blocks south. Beaches in Chicago were not officially segregated in 1919, but there was a tacit understanding that the area around Twenty-ninth Street, just south of a manmade breakwater, was for whites and whites only. So when two black couples appeared on the beach and attempted to enter the water, they were turned away by several angry white bathers. The couples left, but returned sometime later, accompanied by a number of friends. Again they were confronted by white bathers. Tempers flared in the searing afternoon heat, and the situation deteriorated rapidly. Curses and arguments soon led to shoving, fistfights, and rock throwing.²

As this was going on, the raft bearing the five teenagers floated past the breakwater, crossing an invisible line marking the boundary of the white bathing area. A young man standing on the breakwater—later identified as George Stauber—saw them and began hurling stones at the raft. At first, the boys thought he was playing a game, and they joyfully dodged the incoming missiles. But then they realized that this was not intended as fun. According to John Harris, Stauber’s next rock struck his friend Eugene Williams on the forehead, and the boy slipped off the raft and into the water. When he didn’t resurface, Harris dived in after him. Eugene “grabbed my right ankle,” Harris later said, “and, hell, I got scared. I shook him off.” Gasping for air, Harris surfaced and swam out of his friend’s reach. “You could see blood coming up [in the water],” he said, “and the [other] fellows were all excited.” Harris returned to the raft just in time to see Stauber running from the breakwater back to the beach.

Panicking, the boys realized they needed help. “Let’s get the lifeguard,” Harris shouted. He pushed off from the raft again and, though he wasn’t a strong swimmer, managed to dog-paddle the forty feet back to shore. He ran to the Twenty-fifth Street beach and found the head lifeguard, who “blew his whistle and sent a boat around” to look for the boy. But the rescue came too late. After about a half hour of searching, they found Eugene’s limp body in the shallows.

In the meantime, Harris and the other boys had come back to the Twenty-ninth Street beach with a black policeman. Various groups were still fighting, but the boys managed to point out George Stauber, the man they claimed had thrown stones at their raft. When the policeman moved to take Stauber into custody, a white colleague—Officer Daniel Callahan—allegedly stepped in to prevent the arrest. The two officers argued, and then, to make matters worse, Callahan proceeded to arrest one of the black combatants. Incensed, the black crowd set upon Stauber, beating him severely, and, according to one report, also began menacing Officer Callahan, who ran to a nearby drugstore to phone for backup.³

By now, a crowd of some one thousand people of both races had gathered at the foot of Twenty-ninth Street, roused by exaggerated rumors about what had just happened on the beach. One story held that a white swimmer had drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a black man. Another claimed that Officer Callahan had actively prevented the rescue of Eugene Williams, even holding a gun on the black crowd to keep them from the water while the boy drowned. The fact that several white bathers had actually assisted in the search for Eugene Williams was lost in the swirl of ugly hearsay. Given the toxic racial atmosphere in the city after months of bombings and other incidents, each race was clearly willing to believe anything of the other, no matter how brutal, and so escalation of the conflict seemed inevitable.⁴

Before long, two patrol wagons pulled up at the chaotic scene at the foot of Twenty-ninth Street. As police emerged from the vehicles, shots were fired from one of the black crowds. One bullet hit policeman John O’Brien in the left arm. The crowd scattered immediately, but a black policeman named Jesse Igoe returned fire, fatally wounding the shooter—James Crawford—in the abdomen. O’Brien also shot at the retreating crowd, hitting two more black men.

From there, the battle spilled rapidly out into the streets of the South Side. Police followed rioters westward from Cottage Grove Avenue, and as the individual combatants fanned out through the neighborhoods ahead of their pursuers, they drew more and more people into the sunbaked streets, ready to do battle. There was more shooting, rock throwing, and several stabbings. A white fireman was pulled from a passing engine and beaten. A man leaning out his window to watch a street brawl was hit in the head by a stray bullet. After fifteen minutes, the original beach mob had been entirely dispersed, leaving forty rioters and several policemen injured. But now new skirmishes were erupting in other areas in and around the Black Belt. By 5 p.m., according to the Tribune, “Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street from 29th south to 35th were bubbling cauldrons of action.” Deputy Chief Alcock, hearing reports of the spreading violence, sent out a call to every station in the city to rush all available officers to the South Side.⁵

News was spreading just as fast through the white neighborhoods farther inland from the lake. In the blocks west of Wentworth Avenue, just beyond the western boundary of the Black Belt, calls for retaliation were finding especially fertile ground. This area was the territory of many of the city’s so-called athletic clubs—the gangs of young white toughs who had been responsible for many of the racial attacks in the parks earlier in the summer. Still spoiling for a fight, these clubs—which bore names like “Our Flag,” “Ragen’s Colts,” and “The Hamburgs” (whose membership included a seventeen-year-old Irish boy named Richard J. Daley)—found in the beach incident just the excuse they needed to start a rampage. Arming themselves with baseball bats, knives, revolvers, iron bars, hammers, and bricks, they poured out of their homes and clubhouses in search of any black person who made the mistake of being seen beyond the borders of the Black Belt.⁶

As evening fell, Chicago’s South Side became a battlefield. Police and white and black mobs clashed at Prairie Avenue and Thirty-first Street, at State and Thirty-fifth, and at Thirty-seventh and Cottage Grove. On Thirty-ninth Street, crowds of whites took potshots at blacks on streetcars, wounding one man in the groin. Another black man was pummeled with clubs as he waited for a car on Halsted. Throughout the evening, hundreds of mounted police stormed up and down the avenues, attempting to disperse the warring mobs, but with only limited success. A confrontation quelled on one corner would only reignite on another two or three blocks away. Few arrests were made, as police concentrated on getting the wounded to hospitals, letting their attackers and any witnesses slip away to take up the fight elsewhere.

The streets of the South Side echoed with shouts and gunfire for several hours more. But as Sunday night turned into Monday morning, the fighting waned, and relative calm returned. The mounted police remained on duty into the early-morning hours to prevent any further disturbances, while South Side hospitals worked overtime to care for the injured. Citizens throughout the city could even go to bed that night hoping that the worst was over, that the day’s rioting would turn out to be just a onetime spasm of violence, something brought on by the heat and by the city’s numerous recent stresses. Certainly the day’s toll was bad enough: two black men dead (including Eugene Williams), fifty whites and blacks seriously injured, and scores more suffering minor cuts and bruises. But with a new week beginning tomorrow, many hoped that the hostilities would somehow be put aside and Chicago would get back to work as usual.

By 3 a.m. the streets of the South Side were quiet once more. The owl cars made their way unmolested up and down the deserted avenues. The usual skeleton crew of drunkards, streetwalkers, and homeless people resumed their stations on corners and in empty lots. Behind a million windows—open to catch any breath of a nighttime breeze—Chicago slept uneasily, waiting for morning.⁷