1923 RACE RIOTS CHICAGO. The Negro in Chicago. Commission on the Race Riots of 1919.

A very nicely preserved example of this landmark document in American social history, and the document that cemented Charles S. Johnson’s legacy as one of the premier sociologists of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations itself was a non-partisan, interracial investigative committee appointed by Illinois Governor Frank Lowden after the Chicago riots of July and August 1919, in which thirty-eight lives were lost,  twenty-three Black and fifteen white, and 537 persons were injured. Work began in October 1919, and the commission hired sociologists Graham R. Taylor and Charles S. Johnson, a highly regarding Black researcher finishing just finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Together, they led a research team of fifteen people.

Although the study was officially authored by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Charles H. Johnson, future leader of the New Negro movement, is generally agreed by scholars to be the study's main author. In its breadth and scope, it reflected the emerging field of sociology as practiced at the University of Chicago, with its emphasis on field research, data, and mapping to understand the full scope of the lives of those affected. The report covered topics of migration, employment, housing, discrimination, and violence, structural.

The Negro in Chicago "remains a major landmark in the social scientific study both of race riots and of the condition of the black population in American cities." ~ Martin Bulmer

This example imprinted with the library stamp of Wilford G. Winholtz, one of the architects of the South Side Planning Board's actions during the 1940's, which oversaw a dramatic increase in eminent domain enforced as "slums" were cleared and projects like Cabrini-Green on the North Side and the Trumbull Park Homes and [later] the Robert Taylor Homes on the North Side were built.

The Negro in Chicago. A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. By the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1923. 672pp.

Good + example in original cloth, spine a bit dulled, some minor bumping, corner just through, and very slightly tender between ffep and frontis. Textually very good, crisp and clean.