On this day in 1919, a Black teenager drifted across an invisible line in Lake Michigan. White beachgoers stoned him until he drowned. He was 17.
His name was Eugene Williams. The "line" was the unofficial boundary between the white and Black sections of a Chicago beach. A line drawn on WATER.
Police arrived. Black witnesses pointed out the man who had thrown the stones. The officer refused to arrest him and arrested a Black man from the crowd instead.
That refusal lit Chicago on fire. Thirteen days of white mobs raiding Black neighborhoods, and Black veterans fighting back: 38 dead, 537 injured, roughly 1,000 Black families burned out of their homes.
It began because a child couldn't see a border that existed only in white minds.
This is why we have documented 150 crimes against Black people that remain unanswered for https://t.co/V6OJtayKnF