If President Donald Trump follows through on his threat to send National Guard troops to Chicago — over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson — then it would be unprecedented.
“In Illinois, we are not aware of the state’s National Guard forces ever being federalized for an in-state response without the Governor’s request and concurrence,” wrote Illinois National Guard public affairs officer Lt. Col. Bradford Leighton in an email to the Tribune.
Trump threatened in a tweet in January 2017 to “send in the Feds!” in response to violence in Chicago. Ultimately, he didn’t.
A review of the Tribune’s archives produced 18 events in which the governor activated the National Guard within Chicago. Two of them — both during the 19th century — involved a sitting U.S. president who acted in coordination with the governor.
“The Pullman Strike (1894) and Railroad Strike (1877) were both considered state active duty,” said Adriana Schroeder, command historian for the Illinois National Guard. “Both of those involved the union, spread throughout the United States, and drew the attention of the president who was in close communications with the governors of the affected states.”
On occasion, state and city officials have disagreed if a National Guard response was warranted.
In 1992, Chicago Housing Authority Chairman Vincent Lane requested Mayor Richard M. Daley activate the National Guard to help sweep the Cabrini-Green public housing development after a sniper killed 7-year-old Dantrell Davis, but that ultimately wasn’t part of Daley’s 11-point plan. Violence in the city during 2008, prompted then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich to offer troops, but Mayor Daley refused to accept them.
Here’s a look back at when the National Guard was enlisted for assistance in Chicago.
Great Railroad Strike (1877)
A rail strike that started in West Virginia grew into a national struggle between industrialists and workers, with Chicago a hotbed of the dispute. Workers demanding the eight-hour day clashed violently with police, militia and even U.S. infantry. President Rutherford Hayes deployed the Army in city after city throughout the East and Midwest, joining with local militias to restore order.
Strikers viewed militiamen and soldiers as strikebreakers, and with the arrival of troops in Chicago, the violence escalated dramatically, as did civilian deaths. The Chicago Times noted that the largely immigrant mob included women — “Bohemian Amazons” wielding clubs in their “brawny arms.” The more heavily armed authorities killed 30 protesters in the fighting, which included an incident known as “The Battle of the Viaduct” because it occurred at a viaduct at 16th and Halsted streets.
Pullman Strike (1894)
Chicago was the center of the nationwide Pullman strike, and the use of troops led to another round of death and destruction. Illinois Gov. John Altgeld, aware that intervention of the militia or the Army would only lead to a repetition of the 1877 violence, would not send the militia to Chicago and urged President Grover Cleveland to refrain from committing troops. Instead, Cleveland ordered the Army into Chicago, and the tragic events of 1877 were repeated.
Race riots (1919)
Black teen Eugene Williams floated on a wooden tie past an invisible, but mutually understood, line that separated a Black beach at 29th Street from a white beach at 26th Street. White youths threw rocks at him, according to later investigations, and Williams, who could not swim, was hit and drowned.
Although several people, white and Black, tried to revive Williams, a police officer at the 26th Street Beach was unwilling to arrest the rock throwers on the word of their Black accusers or to help Williams.
Unequal justice proved to be the rule during the ensuing violence, which killed 38 people — 23 of them Black, 15 white. The four-day chaos was finally ended by the Illinois militia and a cooling rain. Williams is buried in Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island.
West Side riots (1966)
Chicago police shut off a fire hydrant on July 12, 1966, at 1233 S. Throop St., on the Near West Side. Donald Henry was arrested when police said he reopened it. That’s when Henry apparently told onlookers, “You’re not going to let these policemen arrest me. Why don’t you do something about it.”
That’s when a crowd of 200 to 300 people began pelting the officers with rocks and later threw homemade bombs and looted stores.
Mayor Richard J. Daley blamed outsiders — accusing some members of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s staff — for causing the unrest.
“The best remedy we have to offer from riots is to press our nonviolent program even more vigorously,” King responded.
After three nights of violence, Gov. Otto Kerner activated more than 1,500 members of the Illinois National Guard. Many of them were sent home after a few days.
March in Cicero (1966)
Black college student Jerome Huey went to Cicero on May 25, 1966, to interview at a freight loading company. On his way back to the bus stop that evening, according to Tribune archives, four white teens attacked him with a baseball bat as he walked alone near 25th Street and Laramie Avenue. Huey died in a hospital four days later.
Demonstrators marched from Chicago to Cicero on Sept. 4, 1966, to protest Huey’s treatment. The marchers — about 250 in number — were showered with racial epithets, bricks, bottles and firecrackers by an angry crowd of spectators.
Police officers and 2,000 members of the National Guard with rifles and bayonets controlled the hostile crowd. The marchers proceeded south to 25th Street and then west to Laramie Avenue, where they held a prayer vigil on the spot Huey was attacked. His parents, Isaac and Ruth Huey, both now deceased, joined them.
In 1967, three of the four teens charged with murder were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to nine to 20 years in prison. Each served less than five years, public records showed. Prosecutors dropped charges against the fourth teen, who testified against the others.
Riots after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. As the tragic news spread, riots and looting took place in cities including New York, Washington, Nashville, Tenn., and Raleigh, N.C. In Chicago, on the first night of rioting, nine people, all Black, were killed.
Two days later, with the approval of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the U.S. Army was called in and thousands descended on the city’s troubled areas. When the fires died out, 162 buildings had been destroyed, 12 people killed and 3,000 arrested.
Leighton said the response, “started as a state active duty mission for the first two days but, at the request of the Governor, the Illinois National Guard forces were placed on federal orders for the remainder of the response.”
More than 9,900 soldiers and airmen were activated from April 5-13, 1968, Leighton said.
Democratic National Convention (1968)
Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was nominated at the stormy convention that was marked by riots on the streets as well as raucous political demonstrations on the floor of the Chicago Amphitheatre.
Gov. Samuel Shapiro ordered the National Guard to assist the almost 12,000 Chicago police officers, 1,000 federal agents and 7,500 U.S. soldiers already on duty to maintain law and order during the convention. Almost 10,000 members of the Illinois National Guard responded, Leighton said.
First anniversary of King’s assassination (1969)
At least 89 people were injured and 263 arrested on the West and Near North sides of the city on April 3, 1969, after a day full of “fighting, stoning of cars and drivers, looting and some sniper gunfire in the streets,” the Tribune reported.
Five thousand National Guard members were activated by Gov. Richard B. Ogilvie as a precautionary measure at the request of Mayor Daley.
“This is certainly not in keeping with the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King and nothing is going to be gained by this kind of conduct,” Ogilvie said.
‘Days of Rage’ (1969)
Starting on a Wednesday night in a field in Lincoln Park where a year before thousands of demonstrators had clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the self-proclaimed Days of Rage were meaner, better planned and more violent.
On the night of Oct. 8, 1969, hundreds of demonstrators summoned to Chicago by leaders of the radical Students for a Democratic Society to protest the ongoing Chicago 8 trial of the leaders of the convention riots erupted into a destructive orgy of violence.
They marched down LaSalle Street toward the Drake Hotel, aiming, they said, for the nearby residence of U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman, who was presiding over the Chicago 8 trial.
Confronted by police, the demonstrators never made it to their target, but along the way, they left hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage in broken windows, wrecked cars and medical costs.
The next morning, commuters on the Chicago Transit Authority’s 151 bus route gagged on the remnants of the tear gas that had drifted over Michigan Avenue. Meanwhile, more than 2,500 National Guard members took to the streets.
Later that Thursday, a demonstration at the Gen. John Logan statue in Grant Park, the site of a famous 1968 convention riot, was nipped in the bud by cautious police. On Friday, the demonstrations were muted and peaceful.
But on Saturday, the most outrageous Day of Rage arrived.
Hundreds of hard-core protesters gathered on Randolph Street at the site of the Haymarket Square statue of a policeman that had been damaged by a late-night explosion just five days earlier.
Accompanied by an army of police, the marchers walked east on Randolph to LaSalle, where they turned south, ostensibly on a circuitous Loop march to Grant Park.
But at LaSalle and Madison streets, the demonstrators broke ranks, clashed with police and headed east on Madison, breaking store windows and fighting with police in a vicious melee that resulted in nearly 300 arrests, 48 police injuries and unknown more to protesters.
Chicago Bulls championship (1997)
The Phoenix Suns used Chicago’s call for the National Guard to be “on alert” in 1993, as a “rallying cry.” But by the Bulls’ run to their fifth championship in 1997, the city’s officials were proactive in attempting to end the riots and looting that often accompanied the celebration. Mayor Richard M. Daley placed approximately 6,000 police officers and another 2,000 National Guard members were ready to hit the streets.
One man was shot to death while waiting for a bus home from work at Diversey and Cicero avenues. Twelve people people were charged with felonies ranging from assaulting police officers to firing guns. “By comparison, 300 people were charged with felony crimes after the Bulls’ first championship in 1991,” the Tribune reported.
Coronavirus pandemic response (2020-21)
The Illinois National Guard was in the midst of an unprecedented mission, on the ground around the state administering thousands of COVID-19 tests, after already answering other urgent calls for help.
After fighting floods and election-related cybersecurity attacks, nearly 3,000 guardsmen aided in various missions across Illinois from March- July 2020. At the height of its response, about 1,400 guardsmen were on duty in Illinois.
The primary mission of the Illinois National Guard had been on the pandemic’s front line. It marked the first time soldiers and airmen has been mobilized to primarily combat a medical issue in Illinois.
Members handled a variety of jobs, including assisting local health departments with reporting, providing medical assistance at Illinois prisons, working at the Cook County morgue and at the alternate care facility at McCormick Place.
No job proved more valuable — or directly helped more citizens — than their work at the Illinois Department of Public Health’s virus testing sites. The guardsmen conducted about 233,000 tests during the violent spring weather, soldiering through snowstorms, downpours and oppressive heat. They also erected 11 testing sites from scratch, often getting them up and running within two days.
The National Guard wound down its coronavirus testing mission in Illinois in July 2020, but then a small contingent of National Guard troops were sent to Illinois to assist the Illinois National Guard in the setup of a mass vaccination site at the United Center— the largest one in the state. National Guard members also provided mass COVID-19 vaccination assistance at other sites around the city and state during 2021.
Protests after George Floyd’s death (2020)
Gov. Pritzker called for 375 Illinois National Guard members to assist police in quelling the unrest as protests over the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis had given way to looting, vandalism and violent clashes in parts of Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the request, which marked the first time since Mayor Richard J. Daley brought in troops for the ill-fated Democratic National Convention in 1968.
Verdict in Derek Chauvin trial (2021)
Gov. Pritzker activated on April 19, 2021, 125 members of the Illinois National Guard again at the request of Mayor Lightfoot in anticipation of a verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing Floyd. Chauvin was convicted in Floyd’s death.
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