How 'Lovecraft Country' Evokes an Infamous 1951 Race Riot
Episode 3 of Lovecraft Country features a home invasion horror plot.
The episode, however, also echoes a real 1951 incident that took place in Cicero, Illinois.
4,000 white people attacked an apartment, housing a Black family.
Lovecraft Country has been on a horror roll, running manically down the corridor of the genre's biggest tropes—monsters at sundown, cultish orders, towns where things aren't as they seem. On Sunday, the series added the home invasion to its collection, but like its previous horror iterations, this one doubles as a race relations Trojan horse; you're getting horror, but with a side of social commentary.
Here we see a mob of white Chicagoans surrounding and then attacking the Black boarding house, owned by Leti (Jurnee Smollett). They even burn a cross in the front yard, a Ku Klux Klan practice which dates back to 1915.
Just as the practice of chasing out Black travelers after sundown turns out to be real-life horror, so too is this apartment attack taken from America's history books.
What happened in Cicero in 1951?
Attacks on Blacks increased in Chicago following WWII, as Black families sought to relocate from the city’s South Side to majority white neighborhoods. Public housing projects by the Chicago Housing Authority created spaces for such mobility, but those same residences became the targets for arson and bombings.
In 1951, in the western suburb of Cicero, Harvey E. Clark, Jr., 29, a Black war veteran, sought to move his family into a $60 apartment. A town official had warned the apartment’s owner that renting to a Black family would cause “trouble” and that the city would not be responsible for keeping order.
When Clark arrived with a moving van, he met a crowd of protesters. The mob included detectives who, according to Clark’s affidavit, came at him with a crowd of dozens more, telling him to “get out of here fast. There will be no moving into this building.” (Clark’s rental agent was also forced out of the mover’s car by gunpoint.)
Mobs then began rioting over the next few days, growing to as large as 4,000. Police looked on as the mob threw bricks, flares, and torches into the apartment building. (The fire department also decided not to respond.) They threw chairs from the windows and uprooted trees in the yard. All 21 families, including Clark, his wife, and his two children, fled the apartment building prior to the attack. At one point, militiamen arrived to contain the rioters. They were trampled but did not fire on the looters.
A grand jury investigated the incident, but charged none of the looters, instead charging the owner of the house, her lawyer, the rental agent, and an NAACP lawyer. The grand jury also noted it was a “negro plot.”
Clark still remained determined to move into the apartment. He would finally receive legal support in the form of a federal grand jury, which soon launched their own investigation into the incident. The result: the indictment of four Cicero officials and three police officers. Police were fined a total of $2,500 for violating Clark’s civil rights.
Clark moved back to Chicago. Of his place in the north, Clark recalled later, “I was a newcomer to Chicago, and being a Southerner, I thought I was in a free state, Abraham Lincoln's state.”
So far this season, Lovecraft Country has made a point of showing racial violence and discrimination across the northern states. The setting of Ardham, the epicenter of the series and its monsters, is located in Massachusetts.
The monsters don’t end at the Mason-Dixon line, nor with the end of Jim Crow.
You Might Also Like
