The Race Riot in American History

Martin Luther King once described riots as "the language of the unheard." Leading up to what we now understand as "race riots" of people of color in Watts, Newark, and Detroit, and, later on, Los Angeles, there were the "race riots" led by white mobs from the Civil War into the Jim Crow era. These riots were a hateful predecessor to the events of 1992, the events of which would be considered to merely be a tipping point. They would often make spectacles of publicly hanging black folks and burning their houses. Some uprisings of note include the New York City draft riots where Irish-Americans led the largest racially charged insurrection in American History by working class white rioters against blacks being drafted for the Civil War, the death toll at 119 or 120 individuals. The conditions were so bad, martial law was considered, however a satisfactory amount of military force was unavailable due to the Civil War itself. Others include the fall of a self-sufficient African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma called "Black Wall Street" in 1921, where white neighbors destroyed property and, for the first time, the US Government bombed an American community with airstrikes. In 1947, whites in South-Side of Chicago neighborhood Fernwood Park rioted over several African-American veterans and their families moving into a local housing project. The violent mob lasted for three days and required 1000 law enforcement officers to extinguish, although doing little to stop the rioting as evident in the Airport Homes riots which also happened in Chicago in West Lawn and West Elsdon only a year before, started by women and the elderly, also over the objection towards black veterans and their families moving into their communities.

Almost a century after so-called "race riots" by whites and a mere 25 years after the uprising of 1992, although there was only one casualty, there was what many consider to be a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12 of 2017. The Unite the Right rally, which was a later on known to be the Charlottesville riots, started out as a rally in protest of the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park and grew into a state of emergency declared by Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. Protesters included white nationalists, Klansmen, and neo Nazis who collectively chanted racist, antisemitic, and homophobic slogans while carrying semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Confederate flags, and banners containing hate messages. This took place when the night before, a march of white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus bearing Tiki torches and chanting slogans including "White lives matter" and "Jews will not replace us". The protest took a violent turn when members of the rally clashed with counter-protesters, leaving over 30 injured, reaching its peak when a car with white-supremacist ties rammed through a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring 19 and killing one. Tension arose when President Trump failed to condemn white nationalist explicitly by instead stating there was "hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides." In their own narrative, the events Charlottesville may have been a tipping point for white-supremacy.


Jose Domingo