{"id":369804,"date":"2025-11-10T19:03:50","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T19:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/369804\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T19:03:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T19:03:50","slug":"new-memorials-in-chicagos-loop-mark-sites-of-race-riot-of-1919","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/369804\/","title":{"rendered":"New memorials in Chicago’s Loop mark sites of Race Riot of 1919"},"content":{"rendered":"

What happened to Eugene Williams is, to Deaunata Holman, \u201cone of the most heinous crimes that could ever be committed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Holman, Williams was a Black kid growing up on the South Side of Chicago. On the second-hottest day of the year \u2014 July 27, 1919 \u2014 Williams, 17, headed to the lake with some friends to cool down. He never came home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Williams and his friends accidentally floated from the waters of a Black beach into a whites-only one, a man pelted them with stones from the shore until Williams drowned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a story that\u2019s going to always stick with me, even when I get older,\u201d Holman, 26, said.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019 death changed history, sparking the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. Stones and bricks were the instruments of torture awaiting Black Chicagoans who dared to venture outside during those bloody days.<\/p>\n

By the time the state militia withdrew on Aug. 8, 1919, 38 people were killed, 537 were wounded, and more than 1,000 people lost their homes. Black residents made up two-thirds of those killed and also two-thirds of those arrested.<\/p>\n

More than a century after Williams\u2019 death, Holman and other artists have been making their own bricks. But instead of being wielded for violence, the brick markers have become tools<\/a> for healing and public awareness.<\/p>\n

Since the riot\u2019s centennial, the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project has pushed for a large-scale public art venture featuring those killed. Through partnerships with nonprofits Organic Oneness and Firebird Community Art \u2014 which creates the markers \u2014 glass bricks with a colored concrete frame were installed in Bronzeville last year. Each brick represents a person killed in the riot.<\/p>\n

Now, the brick markers are in place in Canaryville, the Lower West Side and the Loop. Nineteen of the 38 planned bricks have been installed to date.<\/p>\n

CRR19 co-director Franklin Cosey-Gay finds the project\u2019s three newest markers, installed in July in the Loop, especially meaningful. On Saturday, he and co-director Peter Cole led a walking tour to those sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose that know about the race riot assume it was focused primarily in Black districts,\u201d Cosey-Gay said between tour stops. \u201cShow(ing) there were victims downtown is incredibly important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

CRR19\u2019s bricks are handmade by participants in Project FIRE, Firebird Community Arts\u2019 rehabilitative program that enrolls young survivors of gun violence in glassblowing classes. By layering screen-printed images within the glass, the bricks combine historical photos relevant to the people who killed \u2014 whether depicting their place of work or their neighborhood \u2014 with the likenesses of the Project FIRE artists who helped make them. Even the texts embedded into the concrete frames were devised collaboratively during a Project FIRE workshop.<\/p>\n

Holman started as a teen participant in Project FIRE in 2015. He\u2019s now a teacher in the program. A sketch of him appears within another brick that will be installed in Grand Boulevard by the end of the year, honoring B.F. Hardy, a Black commuter who was dragged from a streetcar and killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe put our faces in (them) because we\u2019ve been through gun violence, we\u2019ve been through racial acts,\u201d Holman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two of the three Loop memorials sit on heavily trafficked streets. Robert Williams, a 41-year-old janitor, was chased and stabbed in the block where the Harold Washington Library now stands; his memorial is on the sidewalk between the library\u2019s main entrance and the intersection of State and Van Buren streets.<\/p>\n

\"AA ground marker with the name of Paul Hardwick etched in a glass brick is at the intersection of South Wabash Avenue and West Adams Street as part of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project, Nov. 8, 2025, in Chicago. Hardwick was one of 38 people killed during the riot. (John J. Kim\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n

The same day, Paul Hardwick, a 51-year-old waiter at the Palmer House Hotel, was chased and shot by a different roving mob. His marker sits at the southeast corner of Adams Street and Wabash Avenue, at the foot of the \u201cL\u201d station stairs. The Palmer House\u2019s east doors, through which Hardwick likely left work, are visible from the memorial.<\/p>\n

A third marker, further south at State and 9th streets, is in the block where Harold Brignadello, a 35-year-old Rock Island resident, was killed. A 1922 city-commissioned report on the riot \u2014 which Cole considers the \u201cBible\u201d among primary sources on the events of 1919 \u2014 concluded that Brignadello had been part of a group throwing stones at a Black woman\u2019s home. He was shot by someone taking refuge within the home.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were mobs of people who looked like me roaming the streets of Chicago, looking for people who looked like Franklin,\u201d Cole, who is white, said of Cosey-Gay, who is Black, during a presentation before the tour.<\/p>\n