The Cincinnati riots of 1841 occurred after a long drought had created widespread unemployment in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Over a period of several days in September 1841, unemployed whites attacked black residents who defended themselves. Many blacks were rounded up and held behind a cordon and then moved to the jail. According to the authorities, this was for their own protection. [1]
By 1840, Cincinnati had grown from a frontier settlement to the sixth largest city in the US. It was a crowded city of contrasts, with prosperous neighborhoods and squalid, violent slums inhabited by immigrants from Europe and black migrants from the South who were drawn there by economic opportunities.
Many of the businessmen who controlled the city were interested in good relationships with the slave-owning states to the south of the Ohio River and were hostile to abolitionists and blacks. Although a free state, the Ohio constitution denied blacks the right to vote and the Black Laws passed by the state legislature in 1804 and 1807 imposed further restrictions. Black children were denied education in the public schools while black property owners were required to pay taxes to support these schools. Black migrants to the state were required to register and provide surety. Blacks could not serve on a jury, testify in legal cases involving a white person, or serve in the militia. [2] [3]
The black population of Cincinnati had grown from 690 in 1826 to an official count of 2,240 out of a total of 44,000 citizens by 1840. The city also had a high proportion of foreign born residents, nearly 40%. The Irish, more than any other foreign born group, competed with blacks for work and housing, and tensions rose as crowding increased. In 1850 Cincinnati had more blacks than any city of what was later called the Old Northwest, since they could find jobs on the steamboats and riverfront. By this time, many blacks had gained skilled jobs as craftsmen or tradesmen, earning good wages for the time. Many owned property. [4]
On 1 August 1841, the black leaders held ceremonies to commemorate the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that abolished slavery in the British colonies (except for India). Their celebration was viewed with hostility by many whites. That month the city experienced a drought and heat wave that caused the Ohio River to drop to the lowest waterline yet recorded, putting many men out of work who were dependent on river traffic. Idled and hot, men grew testy and argumentative.
Tensions mounted, with several scuffles between whites and blacks in their crowded neighborhoods. [4] On the evening of Tuesday, 31 August, a group of Irish men got into a fight with some blacks. On Wednesday, the fight resumed. A mob of white men armed with clubs attacked the occupants of a black boarding house. The brawl spread to involve occupants of neighboring houses and lasted nearly an hour. Although several people were wounded on both sides, no one reported the incident to the police and no arrests were made. Another encounter took place on Thursday in which two white youths were badly injured, apparently with knives. [5] That day, bands of angry whites were roaming the city. An eyewitness said blacks were "assaulted wherever found in the streets, and with such weapons and violence as to cause death." [6]
On Friday, there were rumors that more serious disturbances were planned. The Cincinnati Daily Gazette, which published a full report of the riots, did not hear of any special police precautions to prevent trouble. [5]
According to John Mercer Langston, then a child of twelve and later an educator and distinguished politician, the black elders armed themselves with guns, planning their defense against attack and elected Major J. Wilkerson, a mulatto, as their leader. [4] Wilkerson had been born a slave in Virginia in 1813 and had purchased his freedom, becoming an elder of the AME church in Cincinnati, a denomination established in 1819 and the first independent black church in the United States.
Langston later described Wilkerson as a "champion of his people's cause" who would "maintain his own rights as well as those of the people he led." Wilkerson ensured that the women and children were moved to safe places. He then deployed the men in defensive positions on roofs, in alleys and behind buildings. [6]
An armed mob organized by people from Kentucky assembled in Fifth Street Market, carrying clubs and stones. Marching toward Broadway and Sixth streets, they wrecked a black-owned confectionery house on Broadway. The crowd grew and ignored calls from local officials, including the mayor, to disperse. [5] Advancing to attack the black neighborhood, the mob was met with gunfire and retreated.
In several additional attacks, people on both sides were wounded and some reported killed. In the middle of the night, a group of whites brought in a six-pounder cannon loaded with boiler punchings and pointed it down Sixth street from Broadway. By this time many of the blacks had fled but fighting continued, the cannon being fired several times. [5]
About 2 a.m., militiamen arrived and managed to end the fighting. The soldiers established a cordon around several blocks of the black neighborhood, holding those within captive. The militia also rounded up other blacks in the city and marched them into the cordoned-off area where they were held captive until they paid bond. [6]
Mayor Samuel W. Davies called a public meeting the next morning (Saturday), at the Court House to discuss how to prevent further violence. The meeting resolved to find and arrest the blacks who had injured the two white boys. [5] This group blamed the black community for the violence when in fact, the blacks had simply defended themselves from large, organized attacks by whites.
While strongly condemning abolitionists, the mayor's group vowed not to tolerate mob violence. The authorities promised to take action to drive out undesirable blacks from the city, saying they would enforce the black law of 1807 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. They would protect African Americans and their property until they either gave bond or left the city.
Black leaders met in Bethel AME church and made assurances to the mayor that they would remain calm, suppress violations of law and order, and refrain from bearing arms. [6] At a special session of the City Council, measures were passed to enlist ordinary citizens, officers, watchmen and firemen to help preserve the peace, authorizing the mayor to increase the number of deputies to five hundred, and calling for the county militia to be deployed. [5]
The militia and temporary policemen (some of whom may have been rioters) were deployed throughout the city with orders to arrest every black man they found. Although many had fled the city to Walnut Hills to the north while others went into hiding, about 300 were rounded up and thrown into jail. A mob followed the prisoners to jail, taunting them, and extra guards were brought in to protect the prisoners. According to the newspapers, Kentuckians were free to visit the jail to search for runaway slaves. [6]
Despite the resolutions and actions, city officials learned that the mob planned to resume attacks on Saturday after nightfall. The Mayor deployed peacekeeping forces which included the military, firemen, and authorized citizens, along with a troop of horses and several companies of volunteer infantry.
The mob organized and divided to attack at different points in the city. They broke into the building that held the press of the Philanthropist, breaking up the press and carrying it to the river where they threw it into the water. They broke into and wrecked several black-owned houses, shops and a church before they finally dispersed around dawn. The authorities took about forty of the mob into custody. [5]
The editor of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette said that the riot could have been checked in its early phases: "A determined corps of fifty or one hundred men would have dispersed the crowd."
According to Langston, the mob's rioting was "the blackest and most detestable moment in Cincinnati's history."
In reaction to destruction caused by the riots, over the next few years the black community established several self-help organizations, including the United Colored Association, the Sons of Enterprise, and the Sons of Liberty. [6] The antislavery author Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati at the time and was strongly influenced by accounts of violence she heard from refugees leaving the riot area. [7]
In the broader context of racism in the United States, mass racial violence in the United States consists of ethnic conflicts and race riots, along with such events as:
The Omaha Race Riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, September 28–29, 1919. The race riot resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a black civilian; the death of two white rioters; the injuries of many Omaha Police Department officers and civilians, including the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of white rioters who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha. It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities and certain rural areas of the United States during the Red Summer of 1919.
Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term "Red Summer" was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence.
The Springfield race riot of 1908 consisted of events of mass racial violence committed against African Americans by a mob of about 5,000 white Americans and European immigrants in Springfield, Illinois, between August 14 and 16, 1908. Two black men had been arrested as suspects in a rape, and attempted rape and murder. The alleged victims were two young white women and the father of one of them. When a mob seeking to lynch the men discovered the sheriff had transferred them out of the city, the whites furiously spread out to attack black neighborhoods, murdered black citizens on the streets, and destroyed black businesses and homes. The state militia was called out to quell the rioting.
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, also known as the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, was an episode of mass racial violence against African Americans in the United States in September 1906. Violent attacks by armed mobs of White Americans against African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia, began after newspapers, on the evening of September 22, 1906, published several unsubstantiated and luridly detailed reports of the alleged rapes of 4 local women by black men. The violence lasted through September 24, 1906. The events were reported by newspapers around the world, including the French Le Petit Journal which described the "lynchings in the USA" and the "massacre of Negroes in Atlanta," the Scottish Aberdeen Press & Journal under the headline "Race Riots in Georgia," and the London Evening Standard under the headlines "Anti-Negro Riots" and "Outrages in Georgia." The final death toll of the conflict is unknown and disputed, but officially at least 25 African Americans and two whites died. Unofficial reports ranged from 10–100 black Americans killed during the massacre. According to the Atlanta History Center, some black Americans were hanged from lampposts; others were shot, beaten or stabbed to death. They were pulled from street cars and attacked on the street; white mobs invaded black neighborhoods, destroying homes and businesses.
The 1943Detroit race riot took place in Detroit, Michigan, from the evening of June 20 through to the early morning of June 22. It occurred in a period of dramatic population increase and social tensions associated with the military buildup of U.S. participation in World War II, as Detroit's automotive industry was converted to the war effort. Existing social tensions and housing shortages were exacerbated by racist feelings about the arrival of nearly 400,000 migrants, both African-American and White Southerners, from the Southeastern United States between 1941 and 1943. The migrants competed for space and jobs against the city's residents as well as against European immigrants and their descendants. The riot escalated after a false rumor spread that a mob of whites had thrown a black mother and her baby into the Detroit River. Blacks looted and destroyed white property as retaliation. Whites overran Woodward to Veron where they proceeded to violently attack black community members and tip over 20 cars that belonged to black families.
The Chicago race riot of 1919 was a violent racial conflict between White Americans and Black Americans that began on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on July 27 and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot, 38 people died. Over the week, injuries attributed to the episodic confrontations stood at 537, two thirds Black and one third white; and between 1,000 and 2,000 residents, most of them Black, lost their homes. Due to its sustained violence and widespread economic impact, it is considered the worst of the scores of riots and civil disturbances across the United States during the "Red Summer" of 1919, so named because of its racial and labor violence. It was also one of the worst riots in the history of Illinois.
The Robert Charles riots of July 24–27, 1900 in New Orleans, Louisiana were sparked after Afro-American laborer Robert Charles fatally shot a white police officer during an altercation and escaped arrest. A large manhunt for him ensued, and a white mob started rioting, attacking blacks throughout the city. The manhunt for Charles began on Monday, July 23, 1900, and ended when Charles was killed on Friday, July 27, shot by a special police volunteer. The mob shot him hundreds more times, and beat the body.
The Detroit race riot of 1863 occurred on March 6, 1863, in the city of Detroit, Michigan, during the American Civil War. At the time, the Detroit Free Press reported these events as "the bloodiest day that ever dawned upon Detroit." It began due to unrest among the working class related to racism and the military draft, which was heightened after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Based in a free state, some recent immigrants and other workers resented being drafted for a war that they thought was waged for the benefit of slaves in the Southern United States, and they feared competition from Black people.
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
The Cincinnati riots of 1884, also known as the Cincinnati Courthouse riots, were caused by public outrage over the decision of a jury to return a verdict of manslaughter in what was seen as a clear case of murder. A mob in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, attempted to find and lynch the perpetrator. In the violence that followed over the next few days, more than 50 people died and the courthouse was destroyed. It was one of the most destructive riots in American history.
The Cincinnati riots of 1836 were caused by racial tensions at a time when African Americans, some of whom had escaped from slavery in the Southern United States, were competing with whites for jobs. The racial riots occurred in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States in April and July 1836 by a mob of whites against black residents. These were part of a pattern of violence at that time. A severe riot had occurred in 1829, led by ethnic Irish, and another riot against blacks broke out in 1841. After the Cincinnati riots of 1829, in which many African Americans lost their homes and property, a growing number of whites, such as the "Lane rebels" who withdrew from the Cincinnati Lane Seminary en masse in 1834 over the issue of abolition, became sympathetic to their plight. The anti-abolitionist rioters of 1836, worried about their jobs if they had to compete with more blacks, attacked both the blacks and white supporters.
The Cincinnati race riots of 1829 were triggered by competition for jobs between Irish immigrants and native blacks and former slaves, in Cincinnati, Ohio but also were related to white fears given the rapid increases of free and fugitive blacks in the city during this decade, particularly in the preceding three years. Merchants complained about the poor neighborhoods along the river as having ill effects on their waterfront shops and trade with southern planters. Artisans excluded blacks from apprenticeships and jobs in the skilled trades. In June 1829 overseers of the poor announced that blacks would be required to post surety bonds of $500 within 30 days or face expulsion from the city and state. This was in accord with a 1807 Black Law passed by the Ohio legislature intended to discourage black settlement in the state.
The Cincinnati Riots of 1855 were clashes between "nativists" and German-Americans. The nativists supported J. D. Taylor, the mayoral candidate for the anti-immigrant American Party, also known as the Know-Nothing Party. During the riots, German-Americans erected barricades in the streets leading into their Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, and fired a cannon over the heads of a mob of nativists attacking them.
Riots in Detroit, Michigan, have occurred since the city was founded in 1701. This area was settled by various ethnicities following thousands of years of indigenous history. During the colonial period, it was nominally ruled by France and Great Britain before the border was set in the early 19th century and it became part of the United States. The first riot, social unrest related to enabling fugitive slaves to escape to Canada, was recorded in 1833. Other riots were related to business protests, unions, and other issues.
The Meridian race riot of 1871 was a race riot in Meridian, Mississippi in March 1871. It followed the arrest of freedmen accused of inciting riot in a downtown fire, and blacks' organizing for self-defense. Although the local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapter had attacked freedmen since the end of the Civil War, generally without punishment, the first local arrest under the 1870 act to suppress the Klan was of a freedman. This angered the black community. During the trial of black leaders, the presiding judge was shot in the courtroom, and a gunfight erupted that killed several people. In the ensuing mob violence, whites killed as many as 30 blacks over the next few days. Democrats drove the Republican mayor from office, and no person was charged or tried in the freedmen's deaths.
The Longview race riot was a series of violent incidents in Longview, Texas, between July 10 and July 12, 1919, when whites attacked black areas of town, killed one black man, and burned down several properties, including the houses of a black teacher and a doctor. It was one of the many race riots in 1919 in the United States during what became known as Red Summer, a period after World War I known for numerous riots occurring mostly in urban areas.
The Johnson–Jeffries riots refer to the dozens of race riots that occurred throughout the United States after African-American boxer Jack Johnson defeated white boxer James J. Jeffries in a boxing match termed the "Fight of the Century". Johnson became the first black World Heavyweight champion in 1908 which made him unpopular with the predominantly white American boxing audiences. Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion came out of retirement to fight Johnson and was nicknamed the "Great White Hope". After Johnson defeated Jeffries on July 4, 1910, many white people felt humiliated and began attacking black people who were celebrating Johnson's victory.
The Danville race riot occurred on July 25, 1903, in Danville, Illinois, when a mob sought to lynch a Black man who had been arrested. On their way to county jail, an altercation occurred that led to the death of a rioter and the subsequent lynching of another Black man. At least two other Black residents were also assaulted. The rioters failed to overtake the police stationed at the jail and the Illinois National Guard restored order the next day.