Mass racial violence in the United States

Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic violence

Riots defined by "race" have taken place between ethnic groups in the United States since as early as the pre-Revolution era of the 18th century. During the early-to-mid- 19th centuries, violent rioting occurred between Protestant "Nativists" and recently arrived Irish Catholic immigrants. These reached heights during the peak of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s in cities including New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. During the early 20th century, riots were common against Irish and French-Canadian immigrants in Providence, Rhode Island.

The San Francisco Vigilance Movements of 1851 and 1856 are often described by sympathetic historians as responses to rampant crime and government corruption. But, recent historians have noted that the vigilantes had a nativist bias; they systematically attacked first Irish immigrants, and later Mexicans, Chileans who came as miners during the California Gold Rush, and Chinese immigrants. During the early 20th century, racial or ethnic violence was directed by whites against Filipinos, Japanese and Armenians in California, who had arrived in waves of immigration.

During the late 19th century and early 20th century, Italian Americans were subject to racial violence. In 1891, eleven Italians were lynched by a mob of thousands in New Orleans. In the 1890s a total of twenty Italians were lynched in the South. Anti-Polish violence also occurred in the same time period.

Nineteenth-century events

Like lynchings, race riots often had their roots in economic tensions or in white defense of the color line.

In 1887, for example, ten thousand workers at sugar plantations in Louisiana, organized by the Knights of Labor, went on strike for an increase in their pay to $1.25 a day. Most of the workers were black, but some were white, infuriating Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery, who declared that "God Almighty has himself drawn the color line." The militia was called in, but withdrawn to give free rein to a lynch mob in Thibodaux. The mob killed between 20 and 300 blacks. A black newspaper described the scene:

" 'Six killed and five wounded' is what the daily papers here say, but from an eye witness to the whole transaction we learn that no less than thirty-five Negroes were killed outright. Lame men and blind women shot; children and hoary-headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down! The Negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected. Those of them not killed took to the woods, a majority of them finding refuge in this city."

In 1891, a mob lynched Joe Coe, a black worker in Omaha, Nebraska suspected of attacking a young white woman from South Omaha. Approximately 10,000 white people, mostly ethnic immigrants from South Omaha, reportedly swarmed the courthouse and took Coe from his jail cell, beating and then lynching him. Reportedly 6,000 people visited Coe's corpse during a public exhibition at which pieces of the lynching rope were sold as souvenirs. This was a period when even officially sanctioned executions, such as hangings, were regularly conducted in public.

Twentieth-century events

Labor and immigrant conflict was a source of tensions that catalyzed into the East St. Louis riot of 1917. White rioters, many of them ethnic immigrants, killed an estimated 100 black residents of East St. Louis, after black residents had killed two white policemen, mistaking the car they were riding in for a previous car of white occupants who drove through a black neighborhood and fired randomly into a crowd of black people .

White-on-Black race riots include the Atlanta riots (1906), the Omaha and Chicago riots (1919), part of a series of riots in the volatile post-World War I environment, and the Tulsa riots (1921).

The Chicago race riot of 1919 grew out of tensions on the Southside, where Irish descendants and African Americans competed for jobs at the stockyards, and where both were crowded into substandard housing. The Irish descendants had been in the city longer, and were organized around athletic and political clubs.

A young black Chicagoan, Eugene Williams, paddled a raft near a Southside Lake Michigan beach into "white territory", and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a young white man. Witnesses pointed out the killer to a policeman, who refused to make an arrest. An indignant black mob attacked the officer. Violence broke out across the city. White mobs, many of them organized around Irish athletic clubs, began pulling black people off trolley cars, attacking black businesses, and beating victims with baseball bats and iron bars. Having learned from the East St. Louis riot, the city closed down the street car system, but the rioting continued. A total of 23 black people and 15 white people were killed.

The 1921 Tulsa race riot grew out of economic competition, as the black Greenwood area was compared to Wall Street, and filled with independent businesses. In the immediate event, black people resisted white people who tried to lynch 19-year-old Dick Rowland, who worked at shoeshines. Thirty-nine people (26 black, 13 white) were confirmed killed. An early 21st century investigation of these events has suggested that the number of casualties could be much higher. White mobs set fire to the black Greenwood district, destroying 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses. Fires leveled 35 blocks of residential and commercial neighborhood. Black people were rounded up by the Oklahoma National Guard and put into several internment centers, including a baseball stadium. White rioters in airplanes shot at black refugees and dropped improvised kerosene bombs and dynamite on them.

By the 1960s, decades of racial, economic, and political forces, which generated inner city poverty, resulted in "race riots" within minority areas in cities across the United States. The beating and rumored death of cab driver John Smith by police, sparked the 1967 Newark riots. This event became, per capita, one of the deadliest civil disturbances of the 1960s. The long and short term causes of the Newark riots are explored in depth in the documentary film Revolution '67 and many news reports of the times. The riots in Newark spread across the United States in most major cities and over 100 deaths were reported. Many inner city neighborhoods in these cities were destroyed. The assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee and later of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968 also led to nationwide rioting across the country with similar mass deaths. During the same time period, and since then, violent acts committed against African-American churches and their members have been commonplace.

The 1980s and '90s saw a number of riots tied to longstanding racial tensions between police and minority communities. The 1980 Miami riots occurred following the death of an African-American motorist at the hands of four white Miami-Dade Police officers who were subsequently acquitted on charges of manslaughter and evidence tampering. Similarly, the six-day 1992 Los Angeles riots erupted after the acquittal of four white LAPD officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King, an African-American motorist. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director of the Harlem-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has identified over 100 instances of mass racial violence in the United States since 1935 and has noted that almost every instance was precipitated by a police incident.

Twenty-first-century events

The trend from the late 20th century continued with unrest due to perceived unfair policing of minority communities. The Cincinnati riots of 2001 were caused by the killing of 19-year-old African-American Timothy Thomas by white police officer Stephen Roach, who was subsequently acquitted on charges of negligent homicide. The 2014 Ferguson unrest occurred against a backdrop of racial tension between police and the black community of Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown; similar incidents elsewhere such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin sparked smaller and isolated protests. According to the Associated Press' annual poll of United States news directors and editors, the top news story of 2014 was police killings of unarmed black people —including the shooting of Michael Brown—as well as their investigations and the protests in their aftermath.

Nativist period 1700s–1860

for information about riots worldwide, see List of riots.

1763: Pontiac's War

1829: Cincinnati riot of 1829 (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Rioting against African Americans results in thousands leaving for Canada.

1829: Charlestown anti-Catholic riots (Charlestown, Massachusetts)

1831: Slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks (Southampton County, Virginia)

1834: Massachusetts Convent Burning

1835: Five Points Riot (New York City)

1841: Cincinnati riot of 1841 (Cincinnati, Ohio)

1844: Philadelphia Nativist Riots (May 6–8/July 5–8)

1851: Hoboken anti-German riot

1855: Bloody Monday (Louisville, KY Anti-German riots)

Civil War period 1861–1865

1863: Detroit race riot

1863: New York City Draft Riot

Post–Civil War and Reconstruction period: 1865–1889

1866: New Orleans riot (New Orleans, Louisiana)

1866: Memphis riots of 1866 (Memphis, Tennessee)

1868: Pulaski riot (Pulaski, Tennessee)

1868: Opelousas massacre (Opelousas, Louisiana)

1868: Camilla, Georgia

1868: Ward Island riot

Irish and German-American indigent immigrants, temporarily interned at Wards Island by the Commissioners of Emigration, begin rioting following an altercation between two residents, resulting in thirty men seriously wounded and around sixty arrested.

1870: Eutaw, Alabama

1870: Laurens, South Carolina

1870: Kirk-Holden war: Alamance County, North Carolina

Federal troops, led by Col. Kirk and requested by NC governor Holden, were sent to extinguish racial violence. Holden was eventually impeached because of the offensive.

1870: New York City orange riot

1871: Meridian race riot of 1871, Mississippi

1871: Second New York City orange riot

1871: Los Angeles anti-Chinese riot

1871: Scranton coal riot

Violence occurs between striking members of a miners' union in Scranton, Pennsylvania when Welsh miners attack Irish and German-American miners who chose to leave the union and accept the terms offered by local mining companies.

1873: Colfax, Louisiana

1874: Vicksburg, Mississippi

1874: New Orleans, Louisiana

1874: Coushatta massacre, Coushatta, Louisiana

1875: Yazoo City, Mississippi

1875: Clinton, Mississippi

1876: Statewide violence in South Carolina

1876: Hamburg, South Carolina

1876: Ellenton, South Carolina

1885: Rock Springs, Wyoming

1885: Tacoma, Washington

1886: Pittsburgh riot

1886: Seattle, Washington

1887: Denver riot of 1887

In one of the largest civil disturbances in the city's history, fighting between Swedish, Hungarian and Polish immigrants resulted in the shooting death of one man and several others were injured before it was broken up by police.

1887: Thibodaux massacre, Thibodaux, Louisiana—strike of 10,000 sugar-cane workers which led to the mass killing of an estimated 50 African Americans

Jim Crow period: 1890–1914

1891: New Orleans anti-Italian riot

A lynch mob storms a local jail and hangs 11 Italians following the acquittal of several Sicilian immigrants alleged to be involved in the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy.

1891: 1st Omaha race riot

10,000 white people storm the local courthouse to beat and lynch Joe Coe, who was alleged to have raped a white child.

1894: Buffalo, New York riot of 1894

Two groups of Irish and Italian-Americans are arrested by police after hurling bricks and shooting each other for a half-hour, resulting from a barroom brawl. After the mob is dispersed by police, five Italians are arrested while two others are sent to a local hospital.

1894: Bituminous coal miners' strike

Much of the violence in this national strike was not specifically racial. In Iowa, where employees of Consolidation Coal Company (Iowa) refused to join the strike, armed confrontation between strikers and strike breakers took on racial overtones because the majority of Consolidation's employees were African American. The National Guard was mobilized to avert open warfare.

1895: 1895 New Orleans dockworkers riot

1898: Wilmington race riot

1898: Lake City, South Carolina

1898: Greenwood County, South Carolina

1899: Newburg, New York riot

Angered about hiring of African-American workers, a group of 80-100 Arab laborers attack African Americans near the Freeman & Hammond brick yard, with numerous men injured on both sides.

1900: New Orleans, Louisiana: Robert Charles riots

1900: New York City

1902: New York City

Anti-Semitic riots initiated by Irish factory workers, city policemen, and thousands of Jews attending Jacob Joseph's funeral

1906: Little Rock, Arkansas

Started after a white police officer in Argenta (North Little Rock) killed a black musician, and another black was killed; racial tensions rose with exchange of gunfire, resulting in half a block of buildings burned down; whites rioted and some blacks fled the city.

1906: Atlanta riots, Georgia

1906: Wahalak & Scooba, Mississippi

1907: Bellingham riots, Washington

1908: Springfield, Illinois

1909: Greek Town riot

A successful Greek immigrant community in South Omaha, Nebraska is burnt to the ground by ethnic whites and its residents are forced to leave town.

1910: Nationwide riots following the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada on July 4

1910 Slocum, Texas massacre, between eight and two hundred black residents around Slocum, Texas were killed by hundreds of armed white men. Eleven white men were arrested, none went to trial.

War and Inter-War period: 1914–1945

1917: East St. Louis, Illinois

1917: Chester, Pennsylvania

1917: Philadelphia

1917: Houston riot

Red Summer of 1919

1919: Washington, D.C.

1919: Chicago, Illinois

1919: Omaha, Nebraska

1919: Charleston, South Carolina

1919: Longview, Texas

1919: Knoxville, Tennessee

1919: Elaine, Arkansas

1920: Ocoee, Florida

1920: West Frankfort, Illinois

1921: Tulsa, Oklahoma

1923: Rosewood, Florida (area is now an outgrowth of Cedar Key, Florida)

1927: Little Rock, Arkansas - Lynching of John Carter, a suspect in a murder, was followed by rioting by 5,000 whites in the city, who destroyed a black business area

1927 Poughkeepsie, New York – A wave of civil unrest, violence and vandalism by local White mobs against Blacks, as well Greek, Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican targets in the community.

1930: Watsonville, California

1935: Harlem race riot

1943: Detroit race riot

1943: Harlem race riot

1943: Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles

1944: Agana race riot, Guam

1963

Birmingham riot of 1963; Birmingham, Alabama - May

Cambridge riot of 1963; Cambridge, Maryland - June

1964

Rochester 1964 race riot; Rochester, New York – July

New York City 1964 riot; New York City – July

Philadelphia 1964 race riot; Philadelphia – August

Jersey City 1964 race riot, August 2–4, Jersey City, New Jersey

Paterson 1964 race riot, August 11–13, Paterson, New Jersey

Elizabeth 1964 race riot, August 11–13, Elizabeth, New Jersey

Chicago 1964 race riot, Dixmoor riot, August 16–17, Chicago

1965

Watts riots; Los Angeles, California – August

1966

Hough riots; Cleveland, Ohio – July

Hunter's Point riot; San Francisco

Division Street riots; Chicago, Illinois – June

1967

1967 Newark riots; Newark, New Jersey – July

1967 Plainfield riots; Plainfield, New Jersey – July

12th Street riot; Detroit, Michigan – July

1967 New York City riot; Harlem, New York City - July

Cambridge riot of 1967; Cambridge, Maryland - July

1967 Rochester riot; Rochester, New York - July

1967 Pontiac riot; Pontiac, Michigan - July

1967 Toledo riot; Toledo, Ohio - July

1967 Flint riot; Flint, Michigan - July

1967 Grand Rapids riot; Grand Rapids, Michigan - July

1967 Houston riot; Houston, Texas - July

1967 Englewood riot; Englewood, New Jersey - July

1967 Tucson riot; Tucson, Arizona - July

1967 Milwaukee riot; Milwaukee, Wisconsin – July

Minneapolis North Side riots; Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota – August

1967 Albina Riot Portland, Oregon - August 30

1968

Orangeburg massacre; Orangeburg, South Carolina – February

King assassination riots: 125 cities in April and May, in response to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. including:

Baltimore riot of 1968; Baltimore Maryland

1968 Washington, D.C. riots; Washington, D.C.

1968 New York City riot; New York City

West Side Riots; Chicago

1968 Detroit riot; Detroit, Michigan

Louisville riots of 1968; Louisville, Kentucky

Hill District MLK riots; Pittsburgh, PA

Summit, Illinois, race riot at Argo High School, September 1968

Miami, Florida riots

1968 Democratic National Convention

1969

1969 York race riot; York, Pennsylvania – July

1969 Hartford Riots, September 1–4, Hartford, Connecticut

1970

Augusta riot; Augusta, Georgia – May

Jackson State killings; Jackson, Mississippi – May

Asbury Park riot; Asbury Park, New Jersey – July

Chicano Moratorium, an anti Vietnam War protest turned riot in East Los Angeles – August

1971

East LA Riots, January 31, East Los Angeles, California

Bridgeport Riots, May 20–21, Bridgeport, Connecticut

Chattanooga riot, May 21–24, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Albuquerque Riots, June 13–14, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Oxnard Riots, July 19, Oxnard, California

Riverside Riots, August 8–9, Riverside, California

Camden riots, August 19–22, Camden, New Jersey

1972

Escambia High School riots; Pensacola, Florida

Blackstone Park Riots, July 16–18, Boston, Massachusetts

1973

Santos Rodriguez riot, Dallas, Texas July 28, 1973

Post-Civil Rights Era: 1974–1988

Boston busing crisis

1977

New York City Blackout riot

1978

Moody Park riots; Houston, Texas

1980

Miami riot 1980 – following the acquittal of four Miami-Dade Police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie. McDuffie, an African-American, died from injuries sustained at the hands of four white officers trying to arrest him after a high-speed chase.

Since 1988

1991: Crown Heights riot – May – between West Indian immigrants and the area's large Hasidic Jewish community, over the accidental killing of a Guyanese immigrant child by an Orthodox Jewish motorist. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men.

1991: Overtown, Miami – In the heavily Black section against Cuban Americans, like earlier riots there in 1982 and 1984.

1992: 1992 Los Angeles riots – April 29 to May 5 – a series of riots, lootings, arsons and civil disturbance that occurred in Los Angeles County, California in 1992, following the acquittal of police officers on trial regarding the assault of Rodney King.

1995: St. Petersburg, Florida riot of 1996, caused by protests against racial profiling and police brutality.

2001: 2001 Cincinnati riots – April – in the African-American section of Over-the-Rhine.

2005: Toledo, Ohio – Neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in North Park, a mostly African-American section of town.

2009: Oakland, CA – Riots following the BART Police shooting of Oscar Grant.

2012 Anaheim, California Riot—followed the shooting of two Hispanic males

2014: Ferguson, MO riots – Riots following the Shooting of Michael Brown

2015: 2015 Baltimore riots – Riots following the death of Freddie Gray

2015: Ferguson unrest – Riots following the anniversary of the Shooting of Michael Brown

2016: 2016 Milwaukee riots – Riots following the fatal shooting of 23 year old Sylville Smith.

2016: Charlotte riot, September 20–21, Riots started in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by police