How the drowning of a Black boy led to two weeks of racist violence and exposed the segregation at the heart of Chicago.
![The Chicago race riot began at the 29th Street Beach after the drowning of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who had crossed an invisible line in the water separating Black people from white people on July 27, 1919 [Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-86288932.jpg?resize=270%2C180&quality=80)
Dorceta E Taylor is a professor of environmental justice at the Yale School of the Environment. She is the author of Toxic Communities (New York Unive... rsity Press), The Rise of the American Conservation Movement (Duke University Press), and The Environment and the People in American Cities (Duke University Press).
How the drowning of a Black boy led to two weeks of racist violence and exposed the segregation at the heart of Chicago.