A Lynch Mob of One
Everyone seemed to be fleeing the brutality of the Chicago sun. There was no haven that compared to the cooling waters of Lake Michigan. Thousands of blacks and whites flocked to its beaches. That is where 17-year-old Eugene Williams and his friends fled. They knew all about the racial battles at the 29th Street Beach—or, they did not.
The boys splashed into the black side of the lake. Williams climbed on a raft and floated, his friends not far away. His raft accidentally drifted past the invisible color line at 29th Street onto the “whites only” side. Yes, Jim Crow had become national.
Twenty-four-year-old George Stauber saw Williams and started pummeling the boys with stones. Hit, Williams plunged into Lake Michigan and drowned. Daniel Callaghan, a Chicago police officer, arrived on the scene first and refused to arrest Stauber, as William Middleton, a black detective sergeant, insisted he should. Callaghan’s backup arrived and stood as stone-faced as the stone that murdered Williams. A standoff. One black beachgoer drew a gun and fired at the police line.
Then the city’s white rage, to Carol Anderson’s term, exploded amid the of a black “invasion” to “clean out” white neighborhoods. When the lynch mobs finally disassembled nearly a week later, 38 people—23 black, 15 white—had perished, more than 350 people had reported injuries, and about 1,000 black homes lay in ashes. The worst incident of white-supremacist terror during the Red Summer of 1919
