I wasn't alive in 1919 either, but I was aware of the race riot that occurred in Chicago that summer through my reading. (BTW, the then young Richard Daley, who would later become the archetypical big city 'Rat machine boss, played a significant role in the white rioting, which occurred in or near his neighborhood. My guess is that the large majority of the white rioters were or went on to become loyal Democrats.)
You don't have to have been alive when an event occurred to know real history and to take that historical knowledge into account in analyzing current events. Nothing wrong with talking about the racially motivated riots of 1919, except that the authoress of the posted article is off base in bringing them into the discussion of the George Zimmerman case. She brings up the 1919 riots as if to say or imply that if whites rioted against blacks at some point in history, it's just payback when and if blacks riot against whites now. Well, two wrongs don't make a right!
Its funny the way we remember history. I suspect its at least partly because history is seldom simple.
The spark that ignited the fuse in 1967 Detroit would have angered anyone. That doesn’t make the rioting OK but raiding a blind pig was hardly worth the result. A better police response to the blind pig would have been to either ignore it and talk to the owner the next day, or close it down without arresting anyone.
That’s the simple answer but things were far more complicated than that. There was rioting all across the country at that time and “coincidentally” enough, the blind pig just happened to be in an apartment upstairs from the office of a community organizing group similar to ACORN. The owner of the building has since admitted that he called others to come and confront police, incited the growing crowd and even threw the first bottle.
When it comes right down to it, I suspect the blind pig was the bait and police took it.
Furthermore, neither the whites nor the blacks living today had any part in the riots of 1919, and Chicago is not Sanford, FL. Two wrongs don’t make a right even among the parties to the first wrong. They certainly don’t make a right with regards to some nebulous non-ancestral guilt that whites in Sanford, FL, are imposed on by virtue of the fact that some race rioters in Chicago in 1919 happened to have also been white. That’s not “payback,” but racism.