On this day in 1919, there was an incident of white supremacist domestic terrorism in Chicago. It was sparked by the drowning of Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old African American youth. He had been stoned by George Stauber for crossing an invisible, unofficial “color line” at a segregated Lake Michigan beach.
The resulting mob violence by European American citizens, combined with African American resistance, lasted for nearly two weeks. In the end, 38 people died, over 500 were injured, and thousands of African American residents were left homeless.
The Chicago History Museum recorded the tragic event this way on their website:
“One hundred and one years ago today, the Chicago Race Riot began with the murder of Eugene Williams and the failure of law enforcement to hold those responsible for his death accountable. On Sunday, July 27, 1919, thousands of Chicagoans sought relief from the brutal heat on the shores of Lake Michigan. Among them was Williams, a seventeen-year-old African American who was on a raft with some friends. They inadvertently drifted across an invisible line that divided the waters by race a few yards out from a ‘white’ beach at 29th Street. Beachgoers witnessed George Stauber, a twenty-four-year-old white man, hurl stones at the boys until Williams fell off the raft and drowned. The first police officer at the scene, Daniel Callahan, refused to take Stauber into custody.”
So absurd is white-body supremacy and its need to feel peerless and unequaled that even natural resources were split, divided down the “color line,” down some shoreline’s invisible middle. So fragile is the idea of white-body supremacy that even the slightest suggestion of social proximity must be eliminated.
In the Bible, stoning was a primary method of capital punishment ordered by the Mosaic Law. It was reserved for the gravest offenses that threatened the community’s spiritual purity, such as blasphemy, idolatry, murder and adultery. It required an official trial, at least two witnesses, and the witnesses had to cast the first stones.
Eugene Williams was stoned to death to protect the social purity of white-body supremacy. According to the Bible, the execution was designed to be communal rather than private, symbolizing the purging of evil from the society, hence the mob violence that ensued.
The mass murdering of these African Americans resulted in no charges, no arrests. It is simply recorded in history as a “race riot” and I am supposed to believe there’s nothing fishy about that?
I am expected to believe this was just the way things were back then, that persons were just misinformed and murderously angry at African Americans. This kind of normalization of group violence, no matter the rationale, is psychotic.
“They didn’t know any better”? George Stauber stoned a child to death for wading on the wrong side of the water because of the belief that he was somehow better based on the social coloring of his skin.
Stauber killed Williams to maintain this white identity. White-body supremacy and white identity are deeply intertwined with the use of physical, structural, and state-sanctioned violence to maintain dominance and control over marginalized communities.
The proof is in the inaction. What did law enforcement do about this crime against Williams’ humanity? Nothing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his then fifteen-year-old son in Between the World and Me: “The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. … All this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.”
The tragic and unfortunate death of Nolan Xavier Wells has me thinking a lot about America’s history with water as it relates to African Americans. His body was found on July 6 after traveling to Horn Island with a group of his European American friends on July 4 when he went missing. But no one seems to know what happened to him. Though Wells was a good swimmer, people began to speculate that he drowned.
Brian Trascher, a board member of the United Cajun Navy, a nonprofit organization that helped search for Wells, has his own suspicions. “If he went into the water at all and became distressed, it was so crowded that day, it seems hard to believe that nobody would have noticed a distressed swimmer in the water,” he said.
Besides, “Everybody knows about Mississippi. Goddamn!”
This is Emmett Till’s Mississippi, Medgar Evers’s Mississippi, James Chaney’s, Andrew Goodman’s and Michael Schwerner’s Mississippi, James Craig Anderson’s and Raheem Carter’s Mississippi. So, of course, there is suspicion as to Wells’s cause of death.
Since the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the water has been a witness to the tragedies caused by colonialism, chattel slavery, racial capitalism and white-body supremacy. This country is “trapped in history and history is trapped in (its citizens),” who are cursed to repeat it.
Because European Americans, those “who believe they are white,” continue to refuse conversations about what their ancestors did on the water. Because of the lengths European Americans will go to maintain white identity. Because they let people like George Stauber get away with murder to reinforce a socially contrived boundary.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.