A Few Red Drops: Prologue–Chapter 5

On that fateful July day, the boys’ water play went dreadfully wrong, sparking a blood-soaked race riot that would shake the city of Chicago and send shock waves across the nation.

Black migrants up from the South clashed with white immigrants from Europe; laborers and union leaders struggled to hold their own against mighty industrialists; police officers and gang members strove to control the streets; Democratic aldermen and a Republican mayor faced off over patronage and power.

Black migrants up from the South clashed with white immigrants from Europe; laborers and union leaders struggled to hold their own against mighty industrialists; police officers and gang members strove to control the streets; Democratic aldermen and a Republican mayor faced off over patronage and power.

They made a beeline for the lake—through the streets, across the railroad tracks, not walking but running, trying to avoid any trouble along the way.

A little north of the rock fight, John and the Williams boys, oblivious of the fray, continued their game of diving and floating.

Back at the Twenty-Ninth Street beach, the anger was gathering momentum that would wreak havoc far beyond Eugene’s death, spattering blood across the city.

As the Defender observed, the rage didn’t blow in out of nowhere that day on the beach: “For years [America] has been sowing the wind and now she is reaping the whirlwind.”

As the Defender observed, the rage didn’t blow in out of nowhere that day on the beach: “For years [America] has been sowing the wind and now she is reaping the whirlwind.”

The tailor he worked for became deathly ill, and word had it that his heirs were planning to claim Jones as bequeathed to them under the tailor’s will and sell him into slavery.

Jones was not one to lie down paralyzed by the specter of danger.

When the Joneses reached Chicago, they befriended a group of abolitionists, black and white, working together as “conductors,” assisting slaves to freedom on the hidden tracks of the Underground Railroad.

The first city census in 1837 put the number of blacks at 77 out of 4,066 residents, though the number of blacks fluctuated from time to time—increasing some when a few new slaves arrived safe from the South, decreasing again when Canada beckoned and Chicago didn’t seem quite far enough north to guarantee safety, or when slave catchers proved those fears right on target, waving the Fugitive Slave Act as legal authority to nab blacks off the streets and drag them back into bondage.

Straight-backed, prim Mary set up a modest but respectable home near the city center, a part of town where blacks and whites lived peaceably together.

Straight-backed, prim Mary set up a modest but respectable home near the city center, a part of town where blacks and whites lived peaceably together.

As recalled by one of his contemporaries, Isbel was “content with the reflected greatness which shone on the blade of his razor and now settled on him.”

A year after the Quinn Chapel meeting, a posse of slave catchers came up out of Maryland into Christiana, Pennsylvania, acting on information that four slaves were hiding out at a free black farmer’s home.

John Jones stepped up to help, leading fundraising efforts in Chicago for what became a successful defense and acquittal.

“As there are times in the affairs of men when forbearance ceases to be a virtue—and since we must abandon the hope of any protection from government, and cannot rely upon protection from the people, we are, therefore, left no other alternative but a resort to self-protection.”

The schism over slavery finally cracked the country wide open.

Some Chicagoans who had found slavery repugnant now shuddered at the prospect of free blacks surging in to take up residence in their city.

In early 1865, Illinois struck down its Black Laws and became the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which enshrined in the Constitution the end of slavery.

By the time he died, eight years later, the next generation of black leaders was hard at work, eager to claim for their people the bounty of that freedom John Jones had spent his life fighting for.

Whites who had fought so valiantly for the end of slavery now focused on their self-interest, patching things up with white southerners and courting northern businessmen.

He felt compelled to take a stand.

On a trip to Chicago in 1893, short, round fireball Ida Wells got to know tall, debonair, easygoing Ferdinand Barnett as they worked together on a pamphlet calling out racial inequities.

On a trip to Chicago in 1893, short, round fireball Ida Wells got to know tall, debonair, easygoing Ferdinand Barnett as they worked together on a pamphlet calling out racial inequities.

They shared their part of town with the group referred to by another black historian as the “Economically Dispossessed”—freed slaves and Civil War veterans who eked out the barest of livings on sporadic day labor or fell back on the charitable donations of the more fortunate in their community.

It was a stinging slap to all of the black workers who had hitched their fortunes to the white man’s union.

Huddling at their exclusive clubs, the patriarchs steered construction of important institutions to serve their black brothers and sisters.

In 1893, Ida Wells-Barnett launched the first black women’s club in Chicago, recruiting an aging Mary Richardson Jones to join as honorary chairperson.

In 1913, though women had not yet achieved the right to vote in federal elections, Illinois extended local suffrage to women.

Ida Wells-Barnett organized the Alpha Suffrage Club to conduct door-to-door registration and sign up legions of new women voters.

In 1919, while young Packingtown toughs roamed the South Side heckling blacks, their mothers and fathers toiled long hours in the nearby Union Stock Yard, earning the barest living by slaughtering and packaging hundreds of thousands of pigs, sheep, and cows each day.

In the space of ten years, new railroad lines were laid, track by track, four thousand miles, sprawling east, west, south, and north from the central terminus: Chicago.

In the old country, they had toiled as tenant farmers under the oppressive control of their English landlords.

Chicago was a hotbed of prejudice.

Opening the local paper, it was not uncommon for an Irishman to find himself the subject of scathing commentary, such as one journalist’s characterization of the Irish as “the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community.”

Opening the local paper, it was not uncommon for an Irishman to find himself the subject of scathing commentary, such as one journalist’s characterization of the Irish as “the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community.”

Opening the local paper, it was not uncommon for an Irishman to find himself the subject of scathing commentary, such as one journalist’s characterization of the Irish as “the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community.”

Opening the local paper, it was not uncommon for an Irishman to find himself the subject of scathing commentary, such as one journalist’s characterization of the Irish as “the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community.”

The December 9, 1876, cover of the popular Harper’s Weekly caricatured blacks and Irish as equally buffoonish.

In the face of hateful prejudice and grueling work, the Irish immigrants maintained hope for the future.

By the 1850s, the canal and the railroads were drawing a throng of new businesses to Chicago.

Many Irish immigrants remained mired in poverty, relying on sporadic day labor to keep them afloat.

They bent their backs to unload heavy crates from ships and trains, or to carry pallets of bricks to and from construction job sites; their daughters scoured pots and boiled laundry.