Garfield Park riot of 1919

Garfield Park riot of 1919
Part of Red Summer
	US News coverage of the Garfield Park riot of 1919
Date	July 1919
Location	Garfield Park, Indianapolis, United States

The Garfield Park riot of 1919 was a race riot that began in

Indianapolis, Indiana

on July 14, 1919. Multiple people, including a seven-year-old girl, were wounded when gunfire broke out.

Riot in the park

Amidst racial tensions during the summer of 1919, a group of white youths in Indianapolis thought that they were being followed by groups of African-Americans. On July 14, 1919, hundreds of white boys 16 to 19 years old converged on Garfield Park. There they used bricks and clubs to beat any black people they came across. When a group of African-Americans took shelter in the house of Nathan Weather, a local black man, the white mob followed them and surrounded the house. Weather fired into the crowd in hopes of dispersing the mob. A seven-year-old onlooker, Charlotte Pieper, received a flesh wound from stray buckshot. Another youth, Paul Karbwitz, 18, was also hit. Police were eventually able to disperse the mob and quell the riot.^[1]

Aftermath

This uprising was one of several incidents of civil unrest that began in the so-called

Chicago Race Riot and the Washington D.C. race riot which killed 38 and 39 people, respectively, and with both having many more non-fatal injuries and extensive property damage reaching up into the millions of dollars.^[2]