When people watched the recent story about the raid on the Tate family’s home, some asked an understandable question:
How could something like that happen?
How could officers enter a home with children inside, point weapons, force a grandmother into the street, and then spend years denying it?
But for many Black residents of Chicago, the events described in that trial did not feel shocking. They felt familiar.
Because the relationship between the Chicago Police Department and Black Chicagoans did not begin in 2018. It stretches back more than a century — through riots, protests, scandals, and investigations that repeatedly exposed the same troubling pattern.
To understand why the Tate family’s experience matters, we have to understand the history that came before it.
1919: Eugene Williams and the Chicago Race Riot
One of the earliest flashpoints occurred during the Red Summer of 1919, one of the most violent periods of racial conflict in American history.
Across the country, Black communities were attacked in riots fueled by white resentment and fear. Washington, D.C., Omaha, Nebraska, and Elaine, Arkansas all experienced deadly racial violence.
Chicago was no exception.
On July 27, 1919, a seventeen-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan with friends. Their raft drifted into a section of the water informally reserved for white bathers.
A white man on the shore began throwing rocks. One of the rocks struck Williams, causing him to fall from the raft and drown. When Chicago police arrived, witnesses pointed out the man who had thrown the rocks. Officers refused to arrest him.
Word of the incident spread quickly through the Black community. What followed was eight days of racial violence that engulfed the city. By the time the riots ended, thirty-eight people were dead and hundreds were injured. Most of the victims were Black.
In the aftermath, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations investigated the causes of the unrest. Its findings were blunt: Black residents distrusted the police — and that distrust was justified.
The Cook County State’s Attorney told investigators that Chicago police often “shut their eyes to crimes committed by white men” while aggressively policing Black citizens.
It was an early warning about a relationship that would remain strained for generations.
1966: Police Brutality and the West Side Uprising
Nearly half a century later, tensions between Black Chicagoans and the police had not improved. In the summer of 1966, Chicago endured what became known as the “long hot summer,” a period of unrest that swept through many American cities.
On Chicago’s West Side, the violence began with something simple: teenagers opening a fire hydrant during a heat wave. Three of the four public swimming pools in the area were closed to Black residents. Opening hydrants had become one of the few ways neighborhood children could cool off during extreme heat.
Police repeatedly shut the hydrants. When the teenagers reopened them, officers responded with force.
Witnesses reported that police beat the young people with clubs until they were bloody and pushed bystanders away from the scene. The brutality ignited days of unrest across the West Side. The National Guard was eventually called in to restore order.
When the violence subsided, more than 500 people had been arrested and dozens were injured. But the underlying issue remained unresolved: the deep mistrust between police and Black communities.
1966: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement
That same summer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought the civil rights movement to Chicago as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement. One of the central goals of the campaign was to challenge housing segregation.
During a march King and other demonstrators were met by a violent white mob that hurled bottles, rocks, and bricks at the marchers. Police stood nearby. They did little to stop the attacks.
King himself was struck in the head by a rock. Later, reflecting on what he experienced, King said something that shocked many Americans: “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.” The comment underscored a painful truth: northern cities were not immune from racial violence or institutional indifference.
1969: Violence at Tilden High School
The following year brought another troubling episode.
In 1969, racial tensions escalated at Tilden High School on Chicago’s South Side. Hundreds of police officers were sent to the school after conflicts between white and Black students intensified.
Witnesses later described scenes of chaos. Black students attempting to flee the violence were chased, beaten, and sprayed with mace. One teenager, Bobby Brown, told reporters that police and white students attacked him while shouting racial slurs. Another student, Roxanne Norfleet, was among dozens of Black teenagers injured during the confrontation.
For many in the community, the incident reinforced a belief that police were not neutral actors during racial conflicts.
The Pattern That Followed
These events were not isolated. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Chicago repeatedly faced allegations of police misconduct, brutality, and systemic failures of accountability. Some incidents became nationally known. Others remained local stories that never received widespread attention. But taken together, they formed a pattern — one that would eventually force the city into a reckoning.
In 2014, that reckoning arrived after the police shooting of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald. Video of the incident, released after a prolonged legal fight, contradicted the initial police narrative and sparked protests across the city.
The controversy led to two major investigations: one by the U.S. Department of Justice and another by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force.
Both reports reached troubling conclusions. They found that the Chicago Police Department had a pattern and practice of using excessive force, particularly against young people, and that a “code of silence” among officers often prevented misconduct from being reported.
Why This History Matters
When the Tate family stood outside their home in 2018, surrounded by police officers after a violent raid, they were not just experiencing a single moment of injustice.
They were stepping into a long history. A history of strained relationships between police and Black communities. A history of investigations, commissions, and reforms that attempted to address those tensions. And a history that reminds us that the struggle for justice is rarely confined to a single moment or a single case. It unfolds over decades. Sometimes over generations.
Understanding that history does not excuse what happens today. But it does help explain why events like the raid on the Tate family’s home resonate so deeply. Because for many Black Chicagoans, these stories are not new. They are part of a long and unfinished conversation about power, accountability, and justice.
