This is Code Switch from MPR. I'm Karen Grixby-Vates, Infrasherine Angie.

Exactly 100 years ago this week, some of the bloodiest race riots this country has ever experienced erupted in more than two dozen cities, including Chicago.

It was known as the Red Summer, though the violence lasted longer than the heat.

That was at a time when black folks from the south had traveled by the thousands to northern cities as part of what would be known later as the Great Migration.

Chicago was a major destination for these migrants, and in addition to southern sharecroppers, the city became home to artists like New Orleans born Louis Armstrong.

That's him we've been listening to. The song, Chicago Breakdown. And Breakdown is a pretty good word for what happened.

In some ways, what sparked the 1919 riots had a lot of the same elements as the conditions we've had in recent years.

Mixed together the arrival of a different population using Gene's air quotes here, racial anxiety, biased policing, and one of the hottest summer zone record and POW.

We're going to start by talking to an actual eyewitness to the Chicago riot.

One-eater-meter, I'm a hundred and seven years old. I came to Chicago from New Orleans.

Juanita Mitchell came to Chicago with her family in the summer of 1919. She was eight years old.

Unfortunately, the Mitchell family arrival coincided with the day the riots started. Soon after she got to her relatives home, Mrs. Mitchell remembers hearing a roar in the distance and seeing her uncle standing in the big window of his house with a rifle at the ready.

And I heard him say, here they come, which meant the race ride was coming down 35 and down.

He was determined to protect his family from the crowd of armed white men speeding through the neighborhood, firing into black homes and businesses.

I remember how afraid my mother was. How afraid my aunt was and I'm going to never forget the tears in my mother's eyes as she cried in her sister's house.

Young Juanita's mother shoot her children away from the window.

The city throbbed wood violence for a week. Many people, including the mayor, were taken by complete surprise.

To understand how things escalated in such short order, let's talk about what was happening back then.

Blicks began to come north for three basic reasons.

Timmy Old Black Jr. is a local historian and civil rights activist. He's 100 years old and was only six months old when his parents became part of the great migration north.

But having lived in Chicago for most of his long life and having heard stories from his relatives, Tim Black knows a lot about the elements that led to the red summer.

He says black people had three reasons that propelled them north.

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