CHICAGO () — Dozens of cyclists rode through Chicago on Saturday in remembrance of the people killed during the 1919 Chicago Race Riot.
The ride also marked the completion of a citywide public art initiative honoring the victims with memorial markers placed across Chicago.
Participants joined a guided bike tour that stopped at locations tied to the violence, including the lakefront site where 17-year-old Eugene Williams was killed in 1919.
“So, 107 years ago, a short distance from here, a 17-year-old Black man named Eugene Williams, with four of his friends, went swimming right over here in Lake Michigan on a hot Sunday afternoon,” said Professor Peter Cole of Western Illinois University. “And when his raft drafted southward to approximately this location, a white man standing where I’m about started throwing rocks at these children and killed one. Eugene Williams was murdered.”
Historians at the event said that, at the time, an unofficial racial boundary divided swimming areas used by Black residents and white residents along the lakefront.
Williams’ killing ignited days of racial violence across Chicago, leaving 38 people dead and hundreds more injured.
“These markers form Chicago’s first citywide memorial dedicated to the victims of racial violence,” said Dr. Franklin Cosey-Gay, co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.
The project features 38 memorial markers installed across roughly 30 square miles of the city. Organizers said the markers are intended both as a permanent tribute to those who died and as a public reminder of a painful chapter that helped shape modern Chicago.
“We ensure that every person who lost their life during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 is remembered where that life was taken – not erased in time, not reduced to just some simple footnote, but permanently woven into the landscape of our city,” said Kenya Merritt, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
