Storytelling is a deep custom in Claire Hartfield’s household.
A Coretta Scott King Ebook Award-winner born and raised in Hyde Park, Hartfield stated her grandmother, who traveled from Louisiana to the South Facet of Chicago throughout the Nice Migration, was an inveterate keeper of her household’s oral histories.
“She was an ideal storyteller,” Hartfield recalled Saturday, throughout a celebration of the awards on the College of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Named after Coretta Scott King, the spouse of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the award acknowledges excellent younger grownup and childrens works by African American authors.
One story that caught with Hartfield takes place shortly after her grandmother, Thelma Shepherd Rone, arrived within the North. It was this story that led Hartfield to jot down “A Few Purple Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919,” which received the 2019 Coretta Scott King Award.
“One sizzling July day in 1919, my grammie, who had simply moved to Chicago from no more than a yr earlier than, was using dwelling from work on a streetcar,” stated Hartfield. “She noticed Black males and white males out within the streets, like proper up subsequent to the streetcar, preventing with each other and throwing rocks.”
The streetcar driver, she continued, was scared to cease. He went straight to the top of the road, removed from her grandmother’s dwelling, and made everybody get out.
“There have been no Ubers again then,” Hartfield stated. “So, she needed to stroll dwelling by means of what she later discovered was a full-fledged race riot that lasted a complete week.”
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was probably the most lethal of the greater than 25 race riots that occurred all through the US that yr. The preventing in Chicago broke out after Eugene Williams, a younger Black swimmer, was stoned to demise by white males at twenty ninth Road Seashore. After seven days of preventing, the riots killed 38 individuals – 23 of whom had been Black and 15 of whom had been white – injured 537 and left hundreds homeless.
The story stayed with Hartfield, who subsequently lived by means of and witnessed her personal set of race-related tragedies, killings and protests.
When King was assassinated in April of 1968, Hartfield was grocery purchasing along with her siblings and father on the now-shuttered Hyde Park Co-op. Immediately, she recalled, a lady bumped into the store screaming “they’ve killed him, they’ve killed Martin.”
“It felt just like the world was caving in,” Hartfield stated.
The following day, she noticed televised footage of individuals operating by means of the streets and smashing home windows. Greater than 100 riots occurred throughout the US after King’s assassination. In Chicago, the riots occurred primarily on the West Facet, but in addition occurred within the Woodlawn neighborhood.
“There was particles in every single place,” she stated.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, when Hartfield was a scholar at Kenwood Excessive Faculty, she and her classmates took college buses to soccer video games. Throughout one journey to Gage Park, white children threw rocks at her bus and spewed racial slurs.
“It felt overwhelming,” she stated. “I did not actually perceive, viscerally, the place all this hatred was coming from.”
After highschool, Hartfield matriculated at Yale College, later returning to the South Facet to attend the College of Chicago Regulation Faculty. After graduating, she oversaw the event of faculty desegregation plans in Chicago and Rockford.
However in 2014, tragedy struck once more – 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
Not lengthy after the killing, Hartfield was in her kitchen quietly listening to CNN as she cooked, when she glanced on the tv and noticed “pictures of Black individuals pouring into the streets in what appeared like anger and grief.”
“In spite of everything of those years and all of my private historical past, the recollections of my youth and of my grandmother’s story simply got here roaring again in my thoughts,” Hartfield stated. “I needed to seek out out what had been occurring in 1919, what had modified and what stays the identical now. So, I began doing a little analysis.”
Hartfield thought she may discover the “seeds of the riot sprouting from occasions” that occurred within the yr or two previous 1919, however quickly realized she needed to go a lot additional again. She started researching Chicago’s founding in 1837, after which turned to Reconstruction, the interval of rebuilding the South after the Civil Conflict.
She was struck studying in regards to the “excessive hopes” Black individuals within the South and past had for Reconstruction. These had been hopes, Hartfield stated, that inside a number of years would “retreat into quiet resignation as segregation hardened in northern cities throughout the nation.”
“Uncovering all of this historical past I may clearly see in a method that I by no means had earlier than, the cycles of convulsion and complacency,” she continued.
Three years later, Hartfield revealed “A Few Purple Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919.”
(Left to proper) Sisters Corinne and Samantha Hoyes sit and pay attention with their grandfather, Thomas Fisher, as artist Carmenita Peoples reads excerpts of Coretta Scott King Ebook Award-winners throughout “Lifting Voices,” an occasion celebrating the awards on the Regenstein Library, 1100 E. 57th St., March 15, 2025.
Authorship was not the one method that Hartfield acted on the recollections of her youth.
As a baby, Hartfield traveled downtown along with her mom to see issues like Buckingham Fountain, the place she would take discover of all the road indicators named after presidents – avenue indicators absent of ladies and other people of shade.
“These had been the individuals who needs to be remembered,” Hartfield recalled considering. “I used to be a bit of child, however I simply assumed that that was the best way issues are.”
And so, in 2017, she and others shaped a League of Ladies Voters working group that efficiently lobbied town to rename Congress Parkway as Ida B. Wells Parkway.
Concluding her discuss on the Regenstein, Hartfield put her tales into the bigger context of multicultural literature.
“Oral historical past, handed down by means of my household, the Shepherd-Rone-Hartfield household line, from era to era, has been central to my life.” Hartfield stated. “However written historical past has expanded my understanding of the world past my household.”
“Books have allowed me, enable all of us, to immerse ourselves within the worlds we might not in any other case have entry to, to listen to the voices of these whose expertise is totally different from ours.”
“To get it proper, we should inform the tales, and we should learn the tales of all our various communities, cultures and experiences.”
“Honoring Voices: The Coretta Scott King Book Awards” exhibition could be seen by means of Might 15 throughout regular library hours on the fourth flooring of the Regenstein Library, 1100 E. 57th Road.
