The year 1919 was one of the most volatile in our nation's history as riots erupted in city after city.

In the moment, right after the war., at the height of the Great Migration, when the complexion of American cities is drastically being transformed, white people attack All that year, there were incidents in at least 26 cities and towns across the country, but it was Chicago that would see some of the worst of the violence.

Chicago goes through a municipal election in 1919.

The Republican Party at that point enjoyed most of the support from African-American voters.

This black constituency was growing in Chicago, but was still something like 3% of the population.

But the fact that that 3% was concentrated in two wards in the city meant that those wards tipped according to how African-Americans voted.

And so a pretty significant animus is coming up against African Americans as spoilers in a municipal election.

By the summer of 1919, racial tensions in Chicago reached a boiling point.

A young man called Eugene Williams at a South Side beach accidentally floats across an imaginary line into white water.

White people stone his makeshift raft until he falls off and ultimately drowns.

Now, black people immediately go to the police officer on duty and say, "Aren't you going to do something?"

The white police officer ignores him.

And eventually, what winds up happening is that the police officer arrests a couple of the African-Americans who are demanding the charges be brought.

It leaves the white man to leave the scene.

Black people get enraged and begin to protest until skirmishes ensue.

And at that point, people begin to mill around the city and spread stories of what it is that happened.

And these were not just whites who are milling around in kind of unorganized mobs.

These were whites that belonged to groups called athletic clubs, that were auxiliaries attached to the Democratic Party, the Sparklers, Ragen's Colts, the Hamburg Club.

They decide now is the time to settle the scores that go back to the election.

Now's the time to kind of go back and sort of establish the order here.

The next day, it's something of a killing field.

In the middle of the day, people are pulled off of streetcars, beaten, and in some cases chased into alleys and then beaten to death or shot or stabbed.

The black neighborhood in Chicago is effectively under siege for three solid days.

We can't get food in there.

We can't get medicine in there.

People can't go to work.

People are terrified.

And if we think about migrants who thought they had left that particular and familiar kind of violence behind.

The police offered little protection.

Some officers simply watched the violence unfold without intervening.

The Black residents of Chicago didn't merely stand by and watch while white men ransacked their neighborhoods.

When white people attacked, Black people fight back.

World War I vets go to the rooftops with their service revolvers and other weapons to defend the largely African American community on the South Side at that moment.

Perimeters are established.

And so you have this multi-day period of white attack and Black resistance.

Chicago wasn't the only city that saw this rise in Black resistance during the so-called Red Summer of 1919.

All across the country, Black people stood up to racist violence defending the neighborhoods that they had created for themselves.

They were spaces of Black possibility and Black sociability, so that when the violence came, Black people already had values of self-worth, of wholeness so that they knew that this white aggression required a response.