Race Riots

American cities have been centers of violence since colonial times. They have been the sites at which economic, social, and political disparity have collided with efforts to sustain established institutions against the petitions of the city's dispossessed. Violent urban conflicts between whites and blacks appear to have some set patterns that evolved and shifted over time. Race riots appear also to have a direct relationship between blacks seeking to establish an autonomous and cooperative place in the city and white leadership's attempts to manage change, stability, and political dominance.

White working-class anti-black violence occurred as a direct response to free blacks' efforts to carve out an autonomous place for themselves. Whites attacked black homes, property, institutions, mobility, and political rights. In contrast, urban slave revolts and the midto late-20th-century black urban rebellions have respectively represented black attempts to change the circumstances that restricted their efforts to realize the promises of freedom within the nation's political, economic, and social fabric.

Urban racial violence began in major colonial cities in 1712 and 1741 when blacks attacked slavery in New York City, and reappeared in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 and 1802. None of these attacks upon slavery resulted in black freedom or the end of slavery. Each was put down brutally by white authorities with significant loss of black life, yet black urban slaves sought to change if not destroy the institution of bondage.

The conflict between urban whites and blacks shifted from slavery to competing definitions of freedom. Whites would initiate the violence, attacking blacks in urban neighborhoods in retaliation for real and imagined transgressions upon white dominance over public space, jobs, housing, and social behavior. Antiblack violence between the 1820s and 1840s occurred in Providence, Rhode Island; Cincinnati, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and New York City. In all four communities, whites attacked black neighborhoods and institutions, destroying property and lives. These invasions also coincided with disenfranchisement of black voters in Providence and Philadelphia. Economic distress for the white working classes, abolition, and temperance also inflamed whites to take out their frustrations with local and national problems upon blacks.

Freedom, contested public space, and political participation continued to be points of racial conflict after the Civil War. Southern cities were involved with change imposed by defeat, global markets, and locally initiated development. Both blacks and whites migrated to cities across the country, seeking jobs, homes, access to public space, and opportunity. Southern cities were engulfed with newcomers between 1865 and 1900. Some of these new people became city leaders. Others entered the newly emerging professional, middle, and working classes and worked in commercial and industrial labor. The working classes participated in local politics, getting their representatives elected to public offices that had a direct impact on urban development. White professionals, civic leaders, clergy, real estate developers, and newspaper owners pursued ways to control working-class behavior. One method was to undermine late-19th-century white working-class and black political coalitions.

[Page 638]White anti-black urban race riots from 1863 to 1900 began with white attacks upon blacks who were using public space and seeking political representation and federal protection. New York City in 1863, Memphis, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana in 1866 were sites of anti-black race riots where these issues defined anti-black violence. Mobile, Alabama and Vicksburg, Mississippi also experienced similar politically motivated racial confrontations.

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