Violent Protests in American History: Part 2 – Race Riots and Racial Protest

American history has had many violent protests, and these often went on for significant periods of time. Here, Theresa Capra continues a series looking at the 2020 protests in America from an historical perspective.

In this article, she considers race-based protests in American history. She looks at how African-Americans often suffered from racist protests in the 19th and into the 20th centuries – and then considers how anti-racist protests in the 1960s and 1919 compare to those of today.

You can read the first article in the series on how 2020’s protests compare to the Bacon’s, Shays’, and Whiskey Rebellions here.

Dr. Theresa Capra is a Professor of Education who teaches education, history, and sociology at a Community College. She is the founder of Edtaps.com, which focuses on research, trends, technology, and tips for educators. 

Policemen and a soldier during race riots in Chicago, Illinois, during the Red Summer of 1919.

How are you doing during these unprecedented times? 

It’s a well-intentioned, but inaccurate, rhetorical question that has become standard in 2020. Indeed, 2020 is a blockbuster year for the American history books: a global pandemic, one of the worst wildfire seasons on record, and in our social media feeds, unrelenting social unrest. But it’s all far from unprecedented - especially the protests. 

Race has been an impetus for countless violent uprisings since the inception of the United States - usually with whites perpetrating the violence upon Blacks. And although the antebellum South was undoubtedly the most oppressive place and violent time for African-Americans, it’s also a widely covered, even romanticized period, teeming with blockbuster movies and best-selling literature. The consequence of this extensive treatment is that many people fail to fully understand racism in early America beyond slavery, even though race riots were common in free states. Furthermore, many white Americans tend to view well-known historical events such as the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement as punctuation marks, periods to be exact, which ended odious periods of Southern history such as slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. However, a closer look handily flips that perspective on its head. Likewise, there is no moral high ground that cosmopolitans or Yankees can claim.

The Big Apple & City of Brotherly Love 

One example can be traced to 1834 when destructive riots, which targeted Blacks and abolitionists, ripped through New York City. Irish Catholics were settling in Manhattan in droves and they frequently clashed with Protestant abolitionists. Additionally, white residents resented the free Black population for becoming assertive and challenging racial norms. Tensions mounted, and white mobs ultimately burned buildings and homes, destroyed municipal property, and attacked African-Americans. They held parts of the city hostage until it all ended. 

Free Blacks in Philadelphia experienced the same ugly racism as their New York City counterparts. A particularly egregious event occurred in 1838 when Pennsylvania Hall, a building erected for abolitionist and suffragette meetings, was burned to the ground by racist mobs. Not one single culprit faced any legal recourse. Originally, whites and Blacks intermingled, and a prosperous African-American community cropped up along Lombard Street. But their success did not go unnoticed and by 1842, residents of Lombard Street came under a full-scale attack by Irish immigrants, who also attacked police officers when they intervened.

Things only worsened as working-class Whites turned their animosity towards African-Americans, whom they viewed as economic competitors. Wealthy, white Philadelphians were sympathetic to the South because they shared commerce, as well as summers in beach resorts such as Cape May, New Jersey. The city that is home to the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall can also claim some of the harshest racial violence in America’s history.

Go West! 

As Americans moved west, they brought horses, carriages, and racism. Midwestern Cincinnati attracted Irish and German immigrants after the Erie Canal reached completion and ultimately became a hotbed of race riots launched by angry whites who feared economic competition from the growing population of free Blacks. Similarly, in Alton, Illinois, whites were agitated by the number of escaped slaves settling in the town due to its border with the slave-state Missouri. They feared economic reprisals from southern states and attributed the situation to a prominent abolitionist and printer Elijah Lovejoy. On November 7, 1837, a murderous mob set fire to a warehouse and shot and killed Elijah Lovejoy. The rioters evaded justice because some of the mobsters were clerks and judges. 

Farther west brings us to Bleeding Kansas (1854-1861), (or Bloody, as some prefer) - a dress rehearsal for the Civil War replete with looting, arson, property destruction, battlelines, small armies, and murder. The original issue, whether Kansas should join the Union as a free or slave state, should have been settled through popular sovereignty, but that was not to be. Both sides hunkered down and belligerent pro-slavery Missourians, known as border ruffians, tampered with elections and used physical intimidation to let the Kansans know which way the wind was blowing. One particularly violent incident occurred when ruffians crossed into the town of Lawrence, a free-state concentration, and sacked, looted, and blew property to smithereens. 

Interestingly, a similar vigilante scenario is surfacing today. Since May 2020, there have been at least 50 reports of armed individuals appearing at Black Lives Matter demonstrations inciting violence while claiming to be peacekeepers. One example is the Kenosha Guard in Wisconsin, a militia group that launched a ‘call to arms’ on social media encouraging ‘patriots’ to rise up and defend property from protesting ‘thugs.’ Kyle Rittenhouse answered their call. He shot three protesters, killing two. 

The Misunderstanding of the Civil War

Obviously, the most violent uprising over race was the American Civil War. Insurgents in seven southern states coordinated an aggressive assault on their own countrymen by first declaring sovereignty, then attacking Fort Sumter while recruiting more rebels along the way - all to preserve chattel slavery in perpetuity. The Confederate States of America, as they called themselves, were willing to cause wanton death and destruction for white supremacy, mostly in their own backyards, which they pulled off six ways to Sunday with a million casualties and unfathomable property damage. Property sequester and destruction were key tactics for both the revolters and quashers. For example, General William T. Sherman affirmed that his March to Sea laid mostly waste to Georgia: “I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.”

Today, Americans tend to forget all this history while admonishing protesters for property damage. They focus on the aftermath rather than the reasons. Agreeably, on its face, the aftermath is shocking. As of June 2020, it was estimated that Minneapolis amassed around 55 million dollars in damages, and Portland over 20 million. In July 2020, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance estimated over 6 million dollars in damages resulting from property ruin and lost revenue. However, evidence demonstrates that the majority of rallies have been peaceful, despite the public’s perception that protesters are laser focused on destruction. Ironically, a lot of the property destruction is because of the Civil War - protestors have toppled statues of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson in Richmond, one of Robert E. Lee in Alabama, a Confederate Defenders monument in South Carolina, and a statue of Charles Linn, just to name a few. 

Isn’t it curious that there are so many monuments glorifying perpetrators who orchestrated the bloodiest riots in American history? As it turns out, revisionists successfully translated a lost cause into the Lost Cause. Around the turn of the 19th century, the Lost Cause movement lobbied to portray Confederates as freedom fighters for state’s rights rather than armed traitors in rebellion over slavery. The Civil War became viewed as a singular political event with causes exacted by both sides. But, it’s better understood as the culmination (and continuation) of a series of extremely violent and destructive uprisings because of race and slavery. 

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it 

The summer of 2020 has been compared to the Long Hot Summer of 1967 when approximately 160 uprisings exploded across the United States in response to police brutality and systemic racism. Some historians have also noted parallels to 1968 - another year full of racial unrest that resulted in the permanent demise of once vibrant urban centers such as Trenton, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. However, farther hindsight is needed for 2020 vision. For instance, the Red Summer of 1919 featured a series of violent racial clashes and like today, it happened upon the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic, the Spanish Flu. Despite the pandemic, one of the most virulent massacres against African-Americans occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when angry white mobs decimated the vibrant metropolis known as Black Wall Street. Tulsa is not very different from its predecessors: Lombard Street, Alton, Cincinnati, or New York. The issues are also not much different than Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, when George Floyd was killed by police officer, Derek Chauvin.

How does this story end? It doesn’t. Today, African-Americans are disenfranchised, underrepresented, too often relegated to low-paying jobs, subjected to chronic unemployment, poverty, and overall subjugation by any standard. White Americans want to know why violent revolts are still happening and perhaps promoting raw history can help. Still, I posit there is not one single comparison to be evenly made. The whole story must find its way back into social institutions, such as schools, in the name human progress.

What do you think of the comparisons between protests in 1919 and the 1960s and those of 2020? Let us know below.

The Intriguing Lost Conversation of the Civil Rights Movement: The Writer and the Monk - James Baldwin and Thomas Merton

Racial tensions have sadly been all too common in the United States over the years. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere are but the latest in a long line of racial issues. Here, Edward J. Vinski presents a fascinating view on race in America, with the help of two very different people who wrote at the height of the American Civil Rights movement.

Photograph of a Young Woman at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. with a Banner, 1963. From the U.S. Information Agency.

When one reads, one enters into a conversation with the writer. Such conversation, although naturally different from the more traditional face-to-face method, allows us to travel across time and distance and even to resurrect the dead. This, of course, is only in a manner of speaking, but in the world of letters the conversation is real. We may hear the words of persons long since dead and descriptions of places we might never visit.

For a brief moment during the height of America’s Civil Rights movement, an unconventional conversation occurred between two men: one, James Baldwin, an African American writer living in Europe, the other, Thomas Merton, a white Trappist monk living in a Kentucky monastery.  While their different backgrounds alone might make their interaction appear somewhat unusual, they shared a social consciousness that transcended their worlds. In this, they were, perhaps, more similar than they might initially seem.  What makes their conversation truly unique, however, is the way they communicated to each other and ultimately to their readers: they conversed primarily through a series of letters not addressed to each other.

The “Correspondence”

In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin demonstrates what it means to be black in America and how whites are, in fact, viewed by their black counterparts. The two essays take the form of letters[1]. The first and shorter of the two, “My Dungeon Shook”, is written as a “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In it, Baldwin describes his own father, recalling that “he was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 3), and he admonishes his nephew that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (p. 4). Through this initial statement, Baldwin shows the connection between the movement toward black freedom and that of white freedom as well. By using the offensive word “nigger” he underscores this fact that American Blacks are an invention of White Americans. It is this creation that causes “defeat “ in those created, as in the case of the senior Baldwin, and it is the crime of which Baldwin accuses his countrymen. He writes that they are destroying:

Hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it […] but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime (p. 5).

Their so-called innocence lies in the fact that White America fails to see the crime. “They are, in effect,” Baldwin writes, “still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (p. 8). As such, the truth about integration is not that it means the acceptance of blacks by whites. Rather, Baldwin tells his nephew, “the terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (p. 8).

In his long-form essay “Letters to a White Liberal”, written in response to The Fire Next Time, Merton recognizes this very assumption among whites that white society is somehow superior to that of blacks. Perhaps more accurately, White America exists under the assumption that it has somehow achieved perfect human completeness.  From this perspective, as Baldwin suggests, blacks are “to be accepted into white society” (Merton, 1964, p. 58). Baldwin and Merton both call attention to the fact that equality does not mean the elevation of one group to the standards of the other. Rather, true integration and equality requires movement on both sides. “Your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to,” writes Baldwin, “[…] if she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 96). Merton concurs. In the only direct correspondence between the two men, Merton wrote a letter to Baldwin shortly after he read The Fire Next Time. In it, he states that human completeness comes only from the realization that “I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack” (Merton, 1964/2008, p. 226).[2]

Even if true equality means that blacks must unilaterally become more like whites, Baldwin questions whether blacks would accept these conditions. He writes that:

I do not know many Negros who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten over the head by the whites […] white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this […] the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 21).

Years earlier, Merton had come to a similar conclusion. Working for a time among Harlem, New York’s poor, sick and dispossessed at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House led him to conclude that “there is not an Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white man is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters” (Merton, 1948/1976, p. 386). Not only do they not wish to be integrated in to such a world, the sickness, drugs and death of Harlem stood not only as a contrast to the corruption and greed of white society, but as an indictment against that very society. Reflecting on what he saw, Merton concluded that such pockets of resistance against White American society may be all that prevents God’s wrath from wiping that very society from the planet.

While both men recognize that the races need each other to achieve perfection, they also acknowledge that awareness of this fact is difficult for people to grasp. Baldwin indicates that such a realization is more difficult for those in power writing that “people are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal […] but they love the idea of being superior” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 87). For whatever reason, Americans have long mistrusted standards of civilization that are not cut from the European model. As a result, white Americans have come to believe that they possess something “[…] that black people need or want.  And this assumption […] makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards” (p. 93).

Merton concurs. Whites, according to him, all too frequently assume that they have nothing to gain from blacks and that black society is therefore “more or less worthless” (Merton, 1964, p. 59), thus echoing the sentiment expressed in his letter to Baldwin. The truth that both writers present is that “different races and cultures are correlative. They mutually complete each other” (Merton, 1964, p. 61).

The problem is that the self-knowledge necessary to change this perception would require an abandoning of the most cherished American myths: that of “freedom-loving heroes” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 100). These are the myths that whites believe and about which blacks know better[3]. As such, most blacks “dismiss white people as slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing” (p. 101). Blacks can’t hate whites, according to Baldwin, because they know how much whites have to lose if integration was to become complete, and that the fear of this loss is such that it is impossible for whites to act with love toward them.

Merton draws the same conclusion, writing:

If the Negro […] enters wholly into white society, then that society is going to be radically changed. This, of course is what the white South very well knows and it is what the white Liberal has failed to understand (Merton, 1964, p. 8).

Equality, thus, can only be obtained through sacrifice particularly on the part of whites. The world they knew will be radically altered on economic, social, and psychological levels. But this is the price to be paid for a new society. “The only way out of this fantastic impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their inexorable demands” (Merton, 1964, p. 9).       

The writer and the monk bring their respective books to a close with calls to action. Baldwin attempts to rally “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” of America. “If we […] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able […] to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 104-105). But if we fail, he writes, the prophecy of the old spiritual will come to pass: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!” (p. 105).

Merton’s ending is, perhaps, less dramatic, but just as powerful. Recognizing the difficulty that whites have in understanding the message of the Black Americans, he writes:

This is the message which the Negro is trying to give white America. I have spelled it out for myself, subject to correction, in order to see whether a white man is even capable of grasping the words, let alone believing them (Merton, 1964, p. 70).

Then, acknowledging that the truly prophetic vision of a racially equal America’s potential can only come from the perspective of Blacks, he brings this message home: “For the rest, you have Moses and the prophets. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and the others. Read them, and see for yourself what they are saying” (p. 70).

Conclusion

The passage of the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in the United States, but it did not end racial injustice. The Brown vs. The Board of Education court decision helped integrate American schools, but did not end racial inequality. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s did not end racial tensions. The last half-century has been one in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by flare-ups of old resentments and suspicions. The events of Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore, Maryland have been nothing but the most recent examples of long-simmering racial tensions boiling over. With each event, there are calls for a national conversation on race. Sadly, people on both sides of the divide often bristle at and deflect any real attempts at open discussion. In the meantime, opportunists seek to achieve their own ends. In so doing, they add a further level of distraction to matters, often doing little more than confirming the worst fears of those on whichever side they seem to oppose.

The truth is that the story of America is intertwined with the messy story of racism, and until the entire nation comes to grips with this disturbing fact, it is likely that a resolution to the problem will continue to elude us. Fifty years ago, Thomas Merton and James Baldwin exchanged “letters” devoted to this topic. If there is any significant lesson to be learned from their “correspondence” it is this: racism in America will not be solved by the nation’s liberals or conservatives, politicians or activists.

Rather, change will be brought about by its prophets who can see the problem from a self-critical, but not self-condemning perspective.

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Author’s note

I ask to be excused a slight stylistic indulgence.  In light of my thesis that the written word allows a measure of immortality, I have written most of this piece in the present tense. I believe that the conversation is too important to have simply happened once and for all in the past. Rather I believe that Merton and Baldwin continue to speak to each of us to this very day.  

References

Baldwin, J. (1963/1985). The fire next time. New York: The Modern Library.

Campbell, J. (1991) Talking at the gates: A life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking.

Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A biography. New York: Arcade

Merton, T. (1948/1976). The seven storey mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Merton, T. (1963/2008). Letter to James Baldwin. In W.H. Shannon and C.M. Bochen (Eds.). Thomas Merton: A life in letters. New York: Harper One.

Merton, T. (1964). Seeds of destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Footnotes

1. The New Yorker, in which the essays were published before being collected in The Fire Next Time, required that all submissions be in the form of a “Letter from….” (Campbell, 1991)

2. As not all of Baldwin’s personal papers have been released to the public, I am not aware of whether he replied to Merton. 

3. This is not an exclusively American problem. While visiting an elementary school in Senegal, Baldwin was outraged to find the children’s textbook referring to their ancestors from Gaul (Leeming, 1994)