Law enforcement authorities said on Wednesday that they were investigating an act of arson involving a cross that had been set on fire in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.
Police officers responded around 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday to an area of the park near the intersection of South Columbus Drive and East Balbo Drive, where they discovered “an object on fire,” the Chicago Police Department said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Chicago Fire Department extinguished the fire and no one was hurt, the police said.
“The motives and circumstances about this incident are under investigation,” the police said in a statement. Burning crosses have long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan and used as symbols of racial hatred and intimidation.
The police did not specify whether they were investigating the burning as a hate crime. No arrests have been made.
The Chicago police released an image on Wednesday of what they said was a person who had been observed fleeing the area where the “object was constructed and lit on fire.”
The F.B.I. is also investigating the episode, according to Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokeswoman for the agency’s Chicago field office, and was “assessing all potential violations of federal law with local law enforcement and prosecutorial partners.”
“We take all potential bias-motivated incidents seriously,” Ms. Szlenkier said.
She added that while initial reports indicated only that an “object” had been set on fire, the authorities now believed it was a cross based on additional video of the episode. Videos posted online purporting to show the burning cross in the park have drawn significant attention.
“Let me be clear that hate has no home here in Illinois,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois wrote in a Facebook post responding to a local news story about the cross, adding: “We will not be silent — those responsible must be held accountable.”
Representatives for Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger of the city’s Saint Sabina Church said on Wednesday that he and the church were offering a $10,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individuals involved.”
“The burning cross is not merely an act of vandalism — it is a historic symbol of terror, fear, and racial hatred,” Father Pfleger said in a Facebook post. “Such acts have no place in our city, our communities, or our nation.”
Jason Ervin, a longtime alderman in the City Council and a member and former chairman of its Black Caucus, said he was “disappointed to see something like that happen in the city of Chicago.”
He said that the burning cross should be prosecuted as a hate crime and that he had never seen anything like it while he was growing up in the city.
Reported hate crimes have been on the rise, nationally as well as in Chicago.
Chicago recorded 80 hate crimes in 2020, according to online police data. A year later, there were 109. Then the numbers surged: 205 in 2022, and 303 in 2023, the highest mark of the decade. Reports eased to 240 in 2024, and 205 in 2025, yet even that reduced figure remained more than double the count from five years earlier. Through the first part of this year, the Chicago police recorded 61 hate crimes, according to the data.
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