A Short History of Englewood
Portrait of Black Chicago
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Copyright 2004
The Riot of 1919
Black residents were confronted with imaginary lines, like the one that separated the black beach and the white beach on Chicago's South Side. In July of 1919 a young black swimmer who crossed that line paid with his life. For five days Chicago rocked with violence. Ultimately, thirty-eight people would die, five hundred and thirty seven would be injured, and approximately one thousand left homeless. Black residents in Englewood's Ogden Park area drove back rioters with guns. The white gang became uncontrollable when a rioter was shot, and left to search for retaliation. They destroyed several homes, including that of a black pastor. Less than a mile away, the Archibald Motley family had lived unafraid in an all white neighborhood for years. That day they barricaded their door with furniture. A white woman came from across the street and begged the mob to leave the family alone. She was speaking for everyone on the block. White gangs called the “Shielders” (a name derived from “shielding” white neighborhoods from black succession) and “Ragen's colts” were blamed for keeping the mob agitated.
Six years earlier, a white man bought a home in Englewood. When he moved in the neighbors discovered that his wife was black. Residents quickly pooled their money and bought the home back from the couple. In another incident, a black woman bought a piece of land and built a cottage on it. After she and her family had moved in the “neighbors” began a steady campaign of threats and insults. When that didn't work, they broke into the house in the middle of night, tied the family up and destroyed the house.
Englewood may have been predominantly Irish, but it had other nationalities and religious groups as well. No Chicago neighborhood was one hundred-percent of any ethnicity; but they all had one thing in common: Negrophobia. This fear gave rise to the practice of “block busting.” Realtors would sell homes to blacks for higher prices; then buy the surrounding homes cheaper from panic stricken whites, and sell them for double to blacks. Chicago Neighborhood Association, made up of Jews, Germans, Polish, and Irish, would meet together “to draw the colored line.” This closed real estate market produced neighborhoods that were either black or white. Although, the Irish had already proved that they did not favor segregation in the work place, the neighborhood was another matter. John T. McGreevy, suggests in Parish Boundaries, a study of the Catholic Church and racism, that ironically, it was the prejudice and discrimination that the Irish had endured themselves that created for them the perception of its inevitability and naturalness.
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