Good morning, Chicago.
On a sweltering summer Sunday in July 1919, a group of Black teenagers with a makeshift wooden raft unintentionally drifted across an invisible boundary line into an area of Lake Michigan near 29th Street used by white beachgoers.
Now, 105 years after what would be known as the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the first five of 38 planned commemorative glass markers — one for each person killed — will be unveiled during a ceremony Saturday in Bronzeville near the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, at an intersection the Chicago Defender called at the time of the riots the “vortex of violence.”
The public art project is the invention of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project, a group that partners with Bronzeville-based nonprofit Organic Oneness to educate the public about the 1919 riots and their lasting effects on racial segregation in Chicago.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Jonathan Bullington.
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