Two Accounts of the 1919 Chicago Riot
A student researching the Chicago race riot of July–August 1919 brings two sources to a seminar. Source A is a Chicago Tribune front-page story from August 2, 1919, describing "rioters" being dispersed and crediting police with restoring order; it quotes no Black residents. Source B is The Negro in Chicago (1922), a 672-page study commissioned by Governor Frank Lowden and produced by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which reports 38 deaths, 537 people injured, and more than 1,000 left homeless, and records Black witnesses saying police fired into Black crowds. The student concludes: "Source B was written by reformers with an agenda, so it is biased. I'll take my facts from the newspaper."
1. Explain what is wrong with the student's reasoning about bias, and how provenance should be weighed for these two sources.
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The student treats bias as a switch: a source is either clean or contaminated. Historians treat it as a direction, and ask what a source's position lets it see well and what it distorts.
- Source A is close in time and has access to police and City Hall, but it is a deadline commercial newspaper writing for a white readership, quotes no Black residents, and offers no method. It is best evidence for what officials said and when, not for what happened on the street.
- Source B was produced three years later by a state-commissioned body that conducted systematic interviews and published its procedures. Its institutional sponsorship is a perspective, not a disqualification - but its framing still filters testimony.
So the correct move is not to pick the "unbiased" one. It is to match each source to the claim it is positioned to support, and to notice that B's casualty counts likely come from official records rather than interviews, which makes them a different kind of evidence from its witness testimony.
2. Identify two independent records that would let the student corroborate the claim that police fired into Black crowds, and say what each could and could not establish.
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Useful corroboration must be independent of the Commission - generated by a different institution, for a different purpose.
- Cook County coroner's inquest files. Sworn testimony, medical evidence, names, and dates. Strong for establishing specific deaths and trajectories. Weak because inquest juries in 1919 Chicago were typically all-white and inquests could be steered.
- Chicago Police Department trial-board or discipline records. Institutional, adversarial, and created by the accused organization - which cuts both ways: a record of a patrolman disciplined for discharging his weapon is powerful precisely because the department had no interest in creating it.
Other options: state's attorney grand jury files, Illinois National Guard after-action reports, the Chicago Defender (contemporaneous but advocacy), hospital admission logs and death certificates (bullet wounds, entry angle). The student should note that none of these is neutral; the argument rests on convergence across records made by bodies with different interests.
3. How should the student treat the absence of Black voices in Source A - as evidence of what?
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Absence is data about the source, not about the event. From Source A's silence the student can legitimately infer:
- The paper's assumed readership and its editors' judgment about whose accounts counted as news.
- What the paper's reporters had access to (police channels) versus what they did not seek (Black neighborhoods, churches, the Defender's reporting).
What the student cannot infer is that Black residents had no account of events, or that nothing happened to them - that would be arguing from silence in the wrong direction. The correct formulation is comparative: Source A's silence, set against Source B's recorded testimony, itself documents the unequal public standing of the two communities in 1919. Point students to the Defender's contemporaneous coverage to show the accounts existed and were simply not solicited.