How a black boy's drifting raft triggered a deadly week of riots 100 years ago in Chicago
CHICAGO - One hundred years ago, 7-year-old Juanita Mitchell should have been playing with other children in the streets during that summer's heat wave and getting to know her new home on Chicago's South Side.
She and her younger sister, Iona, had just moved with their mother into their great-uncle's home near the corner of 35th Street and Giles Avenue, the heart of the city's expanding black community where new faces were showing up daily and thousands of families were hoping to find the jobs and dignity absent in the Jim Crow South.
But instead, Mitchell and other relatives were trapped inside a stifling upstairs room, sometimes huddled behind a piano, as angry mobs of young white men and boys roamed the so-called black belt looking to maim, kill or set fires.
Mitchell - one of the last living eyewitnesses to Chicago's most violent racial conflict that began on July 27, 1919 - still recalls her great-uncle Cecil's signal that white men armed with guns had crossed Wentworth Avenue, the racial dividing line, and entered their neighborhood.
"My uncle pulled out the biggest gun I've ever seen and stood at the window, and I heard him say 'Here they come,'" Mitchell, now 107, recently recalled
