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Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project

CRR19 is a public art project to commemorate the city's worst incident of racial violence

About

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19) exists to commemorate the worst incident of racial violence in the city’s history. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 is long forgotten, despite its huge impact on the subsequent shape and development of the city. Stolpersteine, an ongoing German project to honor Holocaust victims, offers a powerful model for how to use dispersed public art to remember past atrocities and provoke conversations about their legacy. CRR19 proposes to use much-modified versions of stolpersteine to ignite conversations about racism, past and present, in Chicago and the nation. We intend to create and install artistic markers at every location where one of the thirty-eight people was killed in 1919. Given the fact that "forgetting" about this history has not resulted in racial equality and justice, we propose actively remembering the past. Now is the moment for Chicago to confront its bloodiest chapter and heal the wounds that time alone has not. We must remember America's troubled past of racial violence and white supremacy if we wish to make a more equitable and harmonious future.