Democrats and Despots: Policing and Ideology during Chicago’s Red Summer

• In Event: Policing through the Lens of American Political Development

Abstract

Chicago’s 1919 riots were among the most infamous of the events collectively known as Red
Summer. With dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries in the aftermath of the riots, I ask what
the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) racialized response meant for perceptions of policing
and democracy at the time. Moreover, I explore the relationship between early institutional
developments at CPD and Black resistance. Preliminary archival research reveals that local
Black resistance to abusive, arbitrary, and repressive policing often embodied alternative
political visions — visions that easily comport with standard views of American republicanism.
Conversely, white responses — public and private — were markedly antidemocratic. In line with
mainstream Black political thought of the time, Black residents often appeared to be the only
“true believers” in republican and democratic principles. Beyond this, pathbreakers of the time,
including Ida B. Wells, offered interpretations of Red Summer that fundamentally challenged the
organizing assumptions of American liberalism. Overall, the study reveals a dichotomy: white
comfort with racially restrictive citizenship versus Black advocacy for either descriptive
representation or radical redistributions of political and economic power. The project questions
core assumptions about the north-south conceptual divide, democracy and freedom in urban
America, the meaning and purpose of American policing, and the racialized nature of local
institutional development.

Author

• Darius Cozart, Princeton University