"Our Girls" in "the White City:" Race, Place, Gender, and Chicago's Red Summer of 1919

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The second decade of the 20th century saw a Great Migration of African Americans to cities like Chicago. The city’s existing African American community expressed concern for the welfare of “our girls” in a strange, potentially dangerous, new place, and worked to ease their transition to a new way of life. This paper uses texts to understand material conditions experienced by Race people, especially women, in Chicago ca. 1920. It includes a special emphasis on space, how people moved through it, how it was used in struggles for domination and equality. A rumored spatial transgression was the spark for Chicago’s “riot” of 1919. During the violence, black spaces were decimated. The events, including many deaths, were so shocking that a commission was established at the time to study the Great Migration and its consequences for Chicago. That commission’s report is at the center of the archive consulted for this paper.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology