Race Riots

Periods of warfare in American history have been coupled with moments of collective violence on the home front, including, most notably, race riots. The domestic impact of war in stimulating demographic, political, and economic dislocation among American citizens has customarily strained the fragile bonds maintaining tranquility between whites and various marginalized racial groups to their breaking points. Although many incidents of collective racial violence were spontaneous, they were not simply irrational outbursts of pent-up rage and hostility: race riots reflected the existence of deep and long-standing social tensions and anxieties. As such, participants behaved with a sense of purpose, be it to maintain neighborhood boundaries or protest police brutality. Although certain prevailing social conditions—such as migration and urban adjustment, economic competition, political tensions, and the domestic presence of soldiers and veterans—link race riots across various periods of warfare, the riots themselves do not follow a specific typology. Each incident of collective racial violence was historically unique and shaped by the social, political, and economic conditions affecting participants in each specific area.

The years of the Civil War and Reconstruction witnessed several virulent race riots, as many whites, North and South, passionately resisted the elevation of emancipation and African American civil rights to the central goal of the war. The most deadly incident was the New York Anti-Draft Riots of July 1863. Enforcement of the federal Draft Act on July 13, 1863, set off five days of widespread violence. Mobs of predominantly Irish immigrants attacked government officials, wealthy white New Yorkers, and, most prominently, African Americans. The mobs lynched 11 black men, injured dozens more, and destroyed hundreds of buildings, including a black orphanage. The violence functioned as a dual expression of class antagonism and racism.

For southern African Americans, the early years of Reconstruction proved to be just as deadly as the war itself. The Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans riots are of particular significance. On May 1, 1866, a group of black discharged Union soldiers intervened in the arrest of a fellow veteran by Memphis police. Thus commenced three days of rioting where white mobs terrorized the city's black community, killing children, raping women, and burning homes, schools, and hospitals erected by the Freedmen's Bureau. A total of 46 African Americans died in the massacre. The subsequent New Orleans riot had significant implications for the future of Presidential Reconstruction, a plan to readmit former Confederate states into the Union quickly once they had formally emancipated their slaves. On July 30, 1866, the opening day of the state constitutional convention, more than 200 black supporters, mostly Union veterans, encountered a mob of hostile whites resistant to any change in the political and racial status quo. In the ensuing confrontation, police and anti-Republican forces killed 35 African Americans, 3 white radicals, and injured more than 100 others. Northern Republicans used the incident to galvanize support for Radical Reconstruction, a broader plan to provide freedmen with political rights and economic assistance.

Riots erupted intermittently throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898; Atlanta, Georgia, 1906; Springfield, Illinois, 1908), but the World War I era was marked by a dramatic surge in collective racial violence. Factors contributing to race riots during this period included black migration to northern cities, interracial job competition, heightened black political consciousness [Page 692]and white reactions to it, and the physical presence and symbolic potency of black soldiers and veterans.

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