Race Riots

Riots with an ethnoracial dynamic have been a facet of U.S. history since at least the early 19th century. The causes of these disturbances range from anti-immigration sentiments and religious differences to economic rivalry and denial of opportunity to people of color more generally. The rise of urbanization and the ghettoization of specific racial groups in the United States has historically been a major factor in urban rebellions in the 20th century. The Great Migration (1910– 40) of African Americans to the northern section of the country precipitated a conflagration of riots between whites and blacks in the first three decades of the 20th century, as evidenced with the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the Tulsa Riot of 1924 that culminated in the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There were hundreds of disturbances in the civil rights era, and the L.A. Riots following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 were likely one of the largest race riots in U.S. history, involving primarily whites, African Americans, and Koreans.

The history of race riots began with ethnoracial rivalries between old and new immigrants from Europe. Most scholars agree that the terms race and ethnic had similar, if not the same, connotations in the 19th century. In fact, Europeans used a variety of racial labels to classify one another by region, religion, class, and color, including such terms as Teutons, Irish-Iberian, and the Jewish race. The old immigrants were primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from Great Britain, constituting the first significant wave of European immigrants to populate North America after 1607 to the early 1800s. There were noticeable hostilities between second-generation immigrants of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, first-generation German immigrants, and the later influx of Irish Catholic immigrants in the British North American colonies in places such as Pennsylvania and New York as early as the late 17th century. The anti-immigration riots and anti-Catholic riots that took place in the early nineteenth century constitute some of the earliest forms of ethnoracial rioting in the United States.

A body of a dead black man is displayed on the bed of a truck for other black men to view as they were “captured” and held at the Tulsa Convention Hall, one of the holding places for “Negros” during the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Although almost forgotten in American history, this deadly and costly riot began over a black man being accused of sexual assault.