Group 6

Art as History

We can learn a great deal about historical events and trends by examining artistic
expressions of the era. In 1940-1941, Jacob Lawrence, an influential African-
American Artist, did a collection of small paintings that is now known as “The
Migration Series”. These paintings were 60 small pictures in tempera (A type of
watercolor made with eggs as a binding agent) on hardboard panels. Lawrence
painted the 60 pictures not one at a time but production-line style, working on them
all simultaneously. The artist also provided captions to explain how each painting
relates to the overarching story of The Great Migration.

Your task is to examine “The Migration Series” painting in your packet and decide
as a group how the painting relates to the other documents. Your group has 20
minutes to examine the documents and painting. You will need to come up with a
3-5 minute presentation that teaches the class what you have learned about how the
painting that you have been assigned relates to the other documents in your packet.
When you are giving your presentations, a PowerPoint will be on the overhead
projector that includes your assigned painting and documents to show the class
each of your sources.

Be creative!
 Panel 50

“Race riots were very numerous all over the North because of the antagonism that was
caused between the Negro and white workers.  Many of these riots occurred because the
Negro was used as a strike breaker in many of the Northern industries”.
 Chicago Race Riot of 1919
In the months following the end of the First World War in November 1918, thousands of
American servicemen came home from Europe. Most of these men expected to reclaim jobs
similar to those they had held prior to the war. The end of wartime government spending,
however, sent the nation's economy into recession. As a result, many former soldiers
experienced great difficulty finding jobs upon their return to civilian life. The problem was
especially acute in northern industrial cities like Chicago, where during the war employers had
come to rely on previously marginalized groups of workers, including eastern European
immigrants and Southern blacks, to keep their factories, mills, and warehouses operating at
maximum capacity. As the economy worsened, unemployed whites often blamed working
blacks for their hardships. In the nation's largest industrial cities, interracial tensions steadily
increased until the summer of 1919, when race riots erupted in no less than twenty American
cities. The largest and most violent of these riots took place in Chicago.

Chicago's riot began on July 27, after an African-American youth named Eugene Williams,
while swimming with friends in Lake Michigan near 29th Street, strayed into an area informally
reserved for the exclusive use of white bathers. For this, Williams was pelted with stones by an
unruly group of young white men and soon drowned. When the police ignored eyewitness
accounts of the event and refused to arrest those responsible for the boy's death, indignant
crowds of blacks gathered in protest. Distorted accounts of the incident inflamed already tense
relations between black and white Chicagoans. For the next two weeks, gangs of unruly whites,
including many from Bridgeport and the Stockyards district, clashed with mobs of outraged
blacks in sporadic fights across the city's South Side. On the fourth day of rioting, the state
militia was deployed to restore order, but the fighting continued. In the end, the violence claimed
the lives of 38 Chicagoans: 23 blacks, 15 whites. Additionally, over 500 were injured. Hundreds
of families lost everything when their homes were torched by rioters.

Brick-wielding Whites in Pursuit of a Black Victim, Chicago, Illinois, 1919

 Seeking the Cause (Chicago Race Riot of 1919)

Source: Chicago Defender, editorial, August 9, 1919

SO MANY THEORIES HAVE BEEN ADVANCED as to the probable cause of the outbreaks between the races in
the different northern cities that it is difficult for the man or woman whose opinion is based on the stories presented
in the daily press to select any one that will hold longer than a day, or until the next edition of the paper appears.
Those who try to make these outbursts of the lawless acute, those who believe, for instance, that the regrettable
affair at the bathing beach here in Chicago was sufficient to set in motion this machine of destruction, are far from
the right track.

DOES ANY LOGICAL thinking man or woman believe that the recent world war could have been staged on an
incident as trivial—speaking, in the larger sense—as the killing of one, two or a dozen relatives of a royal family? Is
it not conceded that for years Germany, France, England, Russia and Japan had axes to grind, that they cherished
little love for each other, that territorial aggrandizement, trade monopoly and other vital questions were gnawing at
their very heart strings? Was it not clearly proven that Germany contemplated and prepared for war for forty years.
Had a friendly feeling existed would not the killing of these members of the royal family been amicably adjusted
without further bloodshed?

SINCE THE BLACK MAN became an economic factor in the life of the North two things happened. The South
awakened to the fact that they were losing their main prop, and financial destruction stared them in the face if means
were not immediately devised to check the vast hordes of labor that were leaving that section. The southerner may
be a little behind the times, but he has learned the art of squealing as loud as anybody when his pocketbook is
meddled with. First his free slave labor was wrested from him; now the North is gobbling up his cheap labor. While
he cried with one breath for deliverance from the Black man, with the next came all sorts of pleadings and dire
threats to the one who enticed the Black man from the land of cane and cotton. Enigma? Yes, but what's to be done
about it?

THE NORTHERNER, too, had an awakening when, through necessity he placed the Black man in his shops,
factories and industrial plants, he found not the shiftless, lazy tout that had been pictured, but a bright, energetic, apt,
useful and reliable workman, so a permanent place was found for him and he was asked to have his brothers come
and partake of his good fortune.

THERE IS ALWAYS FRICTION when two bodies try to occupy the same place at the same time. The close of the
war threw thousands out of employment. The American white man, believing himself justly entitled to first pick,
questioned the right of a Black man to be holding a job he could fill. The Black man, dating his final papers entitling
him to a place in the sun from the day he landed from overseas, where he had been offering his life for the honor of
his country, pointed to his record as an American citizen and refused longer to be the tool of any man. This display
of manhood brought his enemies to their feet and by fair means or foul it was seemingly agreed to poison the minds
of our friends. The methods employed have been both cunning and dastardly. The bourbon press throughout the
country have aided and abetted this insidious propaganda and have constantly played their trump card, "A big, burly
black brute attacks a white woman."

IT IS AS IMPOSSIBLE to segregate a group of people who comprise such a large percentage of the whole
population as it is to fly to the moon. And every instance where segregation has been practiced we find a retarded
growth and the mob supreme, while the price of a human life is at the zero mark.