Kelsey Taylor has lived in Bronzeville for more than a quarter century.
Until 2019, he didn’t know the story of 17-year-old Eugene Williams, the first victim of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots.
But Sunday night, Taylor was among more than 80 people gathered just north of 31st Street Beach for the fifth annual art-based commemoration of the start of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots.
“I didn’t know his story, but it’s a story we all need to know,” Taylor, 50, said. “If we don’t know our history, we’re bound to repeat it.”
The art event was started five years ago when artist and Lookingglass ensemble member J. Nicole Brooks made a short film titled “Sunset 1919,” a name nearly identical to that of the annual live event Lookingglass creative director Kareem Bandealy joined her to produce: “Sunset 1919: A Ritual.”
Brooks made the film in the wake of civil unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, in addition to many others who died as the result of police brutality.
“This is an opportunity to welcome people to learn about something that happened on our shores that seems unfathomable,” Brooks, a North Lawndale-raised, Washington Park resident said. “But now we’re in 2025 and we’re witnessing things that are unfathomable. What happened to Eugene Williams didn’t stay in 1919.”
Now, the live event — which takes place at Eugene Williams Memorial Square, about a quarter-mile north of 31st Street Beach — features a brief overview of the event’s history, followed by dancing and the release of white carnations into Lake Michigan.
Crowd participation was encouraged as dancers and musicians put on an emotional performance, crying out phrases like “I love you” at times, and ultimately coming together in an embrace at the end before turning the space over to the crowd for a dance party.
Taylor said it’s what made the event special, and stand out from historical displays in museums — as well as the fact that it was held along the lakefront on a beautiful day. He said the public, artistic commemoration was the exact opposite of the division Chicagoans had historically experienced at the spot.
“This has an element of healing,” Taylor said. “This isn’t a riot, there’s no anger in this crowd. So the more we do this kind of thing, the more likely we are to see that we’re in this together.”
On July 27, 1919, a group of Black teens crossed an unofficial line in the water at 29th Street Beach — separating white swimmers there and Black swimmers at 25th Street Beach — after which a white man, 24-year-old George Stauber, threw stones at them. Eventually, the rocks struck Williams in the head, causing him to fall off the raft the boys were on and drown.
Daniel Callahan, the first police officer to arrive, who was white, refused to arrest Stauber, angering Black beachgoers who witnessed the assault.
It was the inciting incident to the week-long 1919 Chicago Race Riots, which left 38 people dead — 23 black, 15 white. More than 500 Chicagoans were injured and 138 indicted for riot-related crimes after the National Guard was called to quell the violence; two-thirds of both the injured and indicted were Black.
Those riots were part of a much wider national trend in the country that year, now known as the Red Summer. In a span of 10 months, more than 250 Black people were killed by white mobs in at least 25 riots across the country. The perpetrators never faced charges.
Some count the Red Summer era as beginning with the slayings of more than two dozen Black residents in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 and extending through the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, when a Black town in Florida was destroyed. At least 1,122 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years.
Sunday’s event was held just a few hundred feet from a memorial to all those who died in the riots, though the small rock on the beach-side trail is easy to miss.
“Suppression is not the way,” Brooks said. “The unfortunate events of July 27, 1919, didn’t just start that day, they bubbled up. … We owe it to everyone to know the history of the ground on which we stand.”
Contributing: AP