Riots, Urban

Riots, Urban. From the Colonial Era to the late twentieth century, groups of people in American cities have expressed their grievances or enforced their collective will through the use or threat of violence. The nature and context of such rioting, however, has changed over time.

Colonial Era through the Civil War.

Colonial riots usually centered on community regulation. In 1710, 1713, and 1729, for example, Bostonians rioted to protest the export of bread that would increase local prices. New Yorkers rioted in 1754 over an unfavorable exchange rate between colonial and British currency that added to the cost of bread and other daily necessities. These disturbances usually did not involve direct physical assaults, but rather street demonstrations and sometimes an attack on property such as a warehouse.

Opposition to British press gangs that forced men into the Royal Navy led to a number of colonial riots, most notably the 1747 Knowles riot in Boston, in which a crowd held British officials hostage and burned a longboat. Elections sometimes triggered collective violence, as in Philadelphia in 1741 when sailors attacked supporters of the Quaker‐German alliance at the polls. Rowdy street celebrations could lead to riots that reflected neighborhood tensions or class antagonisms, as in Boston's Guy Fawkes Day celebrations starting in the 1740s.

The years preceding the Revolutionary War saw hundreds of disturbances directed against imperial regulations. Anti–Stamp Act riots in 1765 resulted in considerable property damage, including the destruction of Lieutenant‐Governor Thomas Hutchinson's elegant house in Boston. The years 1767–1770 brought riots against customs collectors enforcing the hated Townshend Duties. A confrontation between British redcoats and local laborers over jobs, with the imperial crisis as a backdrop, led to what patriots called the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770. On 16 December 1773, the destruction of property and collective defiance of British authority known as the Boston Tea Party helped transform resistance into revolution. Independence did not bring an end to rioting, however. Several bread riots broke out during the Revolutionary War, and two antiprostitution riots occurred in New York City during the 1790s.

Urban riots changed character in the early nineteenth century, as cities became larger and more polyglot. No longer feeling part of a larger community, rioters engaged in acts of physical violence that led to a greater loss of life. By the 1830s and 1840s, ethnic, racial, and class conflict was becoming commonplace on the streets of American cities. Ethnic violence sometimes took political form. In 1834, New York City experienced massive rioting as nativist Whigs and Irish‐American Democrats squared off. Less overtly political were two riots in Philadelphia in 1844 between Protestant nativists and (mostly Irish) Catholics during debates over religion in the public schools. In the first riot, on 6 May, one nativist was killed. The second, on 5 July, erupted when nativists heard rumors that the Irish were arming to defend themselves. Twelve people died as Protestant crowds battled the militia. More politically inspired nativist rioting broke out in the 1850s as gangs linked to the Know‐Nothing party intimidated Catholic voters in Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, and other cities. Irish immigrants sometimes battled among themselves along religious lines. The most serious such clash, in New York City on 14 July 1871, left forty‐one dead.

Class tensions also sparked rioting in the nineteenth century, as in the 1849 Astor Place riot in New York City. This conflict arose from a long‐running feud between two actors, the genteel Briton William Macready, a favorite of elite theatergoers, and the flamboyant American Edwin Forrest, popular with the masses. Some thirty people were killed in the clash between partisans of the two performers.

Urban race riots appeared in the North as early as the Jacksonian Era, as whites physically assaulted African Americans and destroyed their homes and institutions. In a Cincinnati riot in August 1841, determined African Americans beat off an invasion of their neighborhood, but fell back when whites armed with cannon cleared the streets of opposition. The next day, 250 to 300 blacks surrendered to officials for protection as a white mob ransacked African‐American houses and destroyed the African‐American church.

The worst outbreak of urban violence in nineteenth‐century America, the New York City Civil War draft riots of July 1863, combined ethnic, racial, and class tensions. The rioters, many of them Irish immigrants, objected to a draft law that favored the wealthy. In a murderous four‐day rampage, rioters lynched African Americans, burned draft offices and a black orphanage, and attacked the houses of city officials. At least 120 people died before federal troops rushed to New York by President Abraham Lincoln finally quelled the uprising.

Gilded Age to Late Twentiety Century.

Rapid industrialization after the Civil War brought a wave of riots arising from strikes and industrial conflict in which workers fought police, troops, or strikebreakers protecting business interests. During the railroad strikes of 1877, armed confrontations broke out from Baltimore to San Francisco. In Pittsburgh, for example, workers battled militia imported from Philadelphia. Other confrontations rooted in labor unrest occurred at Haymarket in Chicago in 1886; at the Carnegie steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892; and in various cities during the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. Several cities experienced rioting during streetcar strikes around the turn of the century as urban workers rallied to support exploited streetcar employees.

Race riots continued as well. Collective violence directed against African Americans broke out sporadically in the North in the later nineteenth century, and the great migration of southern blacks to northern cities in the early twentieth century led to dozens of riots from 1917 to 1921. The worst of these erupted in East St. Louis in July 1917, leaving forty‐eight dead; Chicago in July 1919 (at least thirty‐eight killed); and Tulsa in 1921 (at least eighty‐five killed).

Around the mid–twentieth century, the nature of rioting once again began to change. As labor unions gained legitimacy during the New Deal, strike‐related rioting faded. Indeed, state and federal governments even tolerated sit‐down strikes (the peaceful occupation of factories by workers), a form of rioting that minimized violence. As open ethnic hostilities became more muted, the older form of race riot involving collective white attacks on black communities ended. The last race riot of this type occurred in Detroit in 1943. Civil rights demonstrators in the South, however, often faced attacks by white segregationists in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Politically motivated disturbances arose on college and university campuses and in some cities, including Washington, D.C., in the later 1960s and early 1970s in opposition to the Vietnam War. These actions usually consisted of the occupation of buildings, but destruction of property and mild attacks on police occurred as well. The attack by Chicago police on antiwar demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was widely condemned as a “police riot.”

A new form of urban rioting erupted in Harlem in 1943 as African Americans protesting job discrimination and other manifestations of racism looted and destroyed white‐owned businesses in Harlem. This form of rioting by poor blacks directed against property in their own neighborhoods, often through arson, spread in the 1960s as hundreds of disturbances erupted in black urban neighborhoods, most notably in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1964, and in Newark and Detroit in 1967. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 led to riots and arson in Washington, D.C., and other cities. Similar outbreaks occasionally occurred after the 1960s, often triggered by police violence or rumors of police misconduct. The most extensive of these disturbances broke out in an African American district of Los Angeles in 1992, following a jury's acquittal of white policemen who had been videotaped beating Rodney King, a black motorist.
See also Antebellum Era; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Haymarket Affair; Homestead Lockout; Lynching; Nativist Movement; New Deal Era, The; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Sit‐Down Strike, Flint; Sixties, The; Whig Party.

Bibliography

Elliott Rudwick , Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917, 1964.
Joseph Boskin , Urban Racial Violence in the Twentieth Century, 1969.
William M. Tuttle Jr. , Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, 1970.
Michael Feldberg , The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America, 1980.
Paul A. Gilje , The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834, 1987.
Iver Bernstein , The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War, 1990.
Michael A. Gordon , The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870–1871, 1993.
Paul A. Gilje , Rioting in America, 1996.
David Grimsted , American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War, 1998.

Paul A. Gilje