THE DILEMMA OF SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS: RACE RIOTS AND CIVIL DISORDER

Second-Class Citizens

In August 1900 a white New York City policeman, Robert Thorpe, died after a fight with Arthur Harris, a black man. The next day mobs of whites set out to avenge his death by attacking blacks. Some black leaders in New York City charged that the police instigated these attacks. Harris was ultimately convicted of Thorpe's murder, and an investigation by the police cleared officers of charges of brutality. Whites and blacks perceived the situation differently, and it seemed impossible that the two would recognize this difference. In 1896 the Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could treat blacks separately but equally, at least in principle. Southern states took steps to disenfranchise blacks, and in northern states restrictive housing covenants and other ordinances restricted where they could live. In 1904 the Maryland legislature passed a law disenfranchising black voters, and though the governor vetoed the act, it still sent a message that blacks were not entitled to full citizenship rights. Blacks were forbidden to move into many towns in Ohio and Indiana.

Brownsville, Texas

The fact that black Americans were held to a different standard of justice than white Americans was borne out in the aftermath of a 1906 riot near Fort Brown, Texas. That August some soldiers from the Twenty-fifth Regiment, an all-black regiment stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, were involved in a riot in Brownsville. One citizen was killed; one was wounded; and the police chief was injured. The commander of Fort Brown prevented violence from escalating. After an investigation President Theodore Roosevelt determined that all members of the regiment had to be disciplined and so dishonorably discharged every soldier in that regiment and disqualified all from further service either in the military or in the civilian branches of government. Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina, a racist demagogue, denounced Roosevelt's action as an "executive lynching," and other, more sincere critics charged that Roosevelt had punished the soldiers because they were black. John Milholland of the Constitution League argued that the soldiers were deprived of their rights, but in January 1907 a Senate investigation approved the president's conduct. In 1909 Sen. Joseph Foraker of Ohio succeeded in having a court of inquiry set up to determine each individual soldier's case and to reinstate those not involved in the riot. Not until 1972, though, were the dishonorable discharges rescinded by Congress.

Political Rights and the Atlanta Riots

Booker T. Washington had urged blacks not to agitate on political questions. Washington, the president and founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, emerged as the leading spokesman for black America. He urged blacks to work toward economic power, but not to agitate for political rights or social equality. Other blacks, like Ida Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, Monroe Trotter, and W. E. B. Du Bois, believed political agitation was essential. In 1905 the more radical leaders met at Niagara Falls, Canada, to discuss ways to improve the lives of black Americans and to free them from the specter of lynch law. Each year, as "the Niagara Movement," they reconvened in a place resonant with the history of the abolitionists: Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; Boston's Faneuil Hall; and Oberlin College in Ohio. The issue of black suffrage touched off in Atlanta in 1906 one of the decade's most severe riots. Georgia was following other states in considering ways to take the vote away from blacks. After months of agitation on this political question, led by Hoke Smith, candidate for governor, and former governor Tom Watson, both of whom urged that the vote be taken away from blacks, Atlanta's newspapers published false reports of black men attacking white women. White mobs formed and attacked every black person they found. In four days of rioting twenty-one people, most of them black and many of them substantial citizens, were killed and many more injured.

Springfield, Illinois

In 1908 racial violence struck in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln. A white woman, Mrs. Earle Hallam, accused George Richardson, a black man, of dragging her from her bed and raping her. When Hallam testified before a grand jury, though, she recanted her charge against Richardson. She had been beaten by a white man, with whom she had sexual relations, but she declined to name him. It was a sordid episode for her, and to escape her shame she had accused Richardson. Though she now withdrew her charge, the white community was enraged. To protect Richardson, the authorities had put him on an outbound train. When a white mob discovered him gone, it went on a rampage. The mob destroyed a restaurant whose owner had driven Richardson to the train and then set out to find more weapons. They broke into stores to seize guns, axes, knives, and kerosene. They burned a barber shop and lynched the barber, a black man, and were about to burn his body when the state militia, called from neighboring Decatur, fired on them to disperse. The next night the mob resumed its violence, lynching an eighty-four-year-old black man who had lived with his wife, a white woman, for thirty quiet years. The mob pursued one black man into a crowd in front of the courthouse, where Eugene Chafin, the presidential candidate of the Prohibition Party, was speaking. When Chafin tried to protect the man, he was smashed in the face with a brick. It took five thousand state militia to restore order. Two men were lynched; two whites were killed; and seventy people were injured.

Founding of the NAACP

That this racial violence had happened within a few blocks of Abraham Lincoln's house, and less than two miles from his grave, in the year before the centennial of his birth shocked white America, which had not taken a keen interest in the problems of black Americans. In May 1909 a National Conference on the Negro convened. Though sponsored by whites, including Jane Addams, Oswald Garrison Villard (editor of the Nation and grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison), and William English Walling, who had investigated the Springfield, Illinois, riot, the conference also invited participants from the Niagara Movement. Out of this conference emerged the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with Moorfield Storey, a prominent white Bostonian, as its head. W. E. B. Du Bois, the only black person in a prominent position in the organization, was named as editor of the NAACP newspaper, The Crisis. The NAACP would combat lynching, though lynching would never become a federal crime. The NAACP also began a long legal campaign against segregation, culminating in 1954 when the Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson and ruled that separate but equal is inherently unequal.

Sources:

John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994);

Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975);

Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919 (New York: Norton, 1987).

THE MIAMI RACE RIOTS

Act of Retribution

"It was real bad, I hadn't seen anything like it since I left Vietnam." So went the description by Miami police officer Manny Lopez of a scene of mob violence in the black neighborhood of Liberty City following the acquittal of four white former police officers of charges that they had beaten black businessman Arthur McDuffie to death. Lopez was describing what he found when he arrived on the scene of black mob violence against three young white people, attacked for no reason other than the color of their skin. Michael Kulp, eighteen, was driving a car containing two passengers—his brother Jeffrey, twenty-two, and their friend Debra Getman, twenty-three—through the Liberty City area when the car was struck by bricks and bottles. Michael Kulp lost control of his car and struck Shanreka Perry, an eleven-year-old black girl, then smashed into a building. The crowd pulled the three from the car and began beating them. Michael suffered a fractured skull; Jeffrey was shot in the back, stabbed, beaten, and repeatedly run over by a car. When police found the still-living victims, a red flower had been inserted in Jeffrey Kulp's mouth. Debra Getman was taken to safety by a black man.

Arthur McDuffie

Arthur McDuffie, thirty-three, was a former marine and an insurance agent. He had just won a free trip to Hawaii as a bonus for selling so much insurance and was in the process of remarrying his former wife. On 17 December 1979 things were definitely looking rosy for him. On that night however, he was riding his cousin's motorcycle at about 2 A.M. when he drove through a red light in north Miami. His driver's license had been suspended because of a bounced check written to pay for another traffic offense. When Dade County Metro police pursued him for running the light, he attempted to escape and, according to police, ran more than twenty-five more red lights at speeds up to 100 MPH before being apprehended by a dozen Miami and Metro police. Initial police reports indicated that he had crashed and hit his head on the ground, then resisted arrest so that police had to use force to arrest him.

Conflicting Stories

Rumors and stories began to swirl around the police stations after McDuffie's death from head injuries four days later. Police officials notified Dade County's state attorney (and future U.S. attorney general), Janet Reno, of the situation. After a four-day investigation, prosecutor Henry Adorno filed charges against six Metro police officers on charges ranging from participating in a cover-up to second-degree murder. Eventually four officers, Alex Marrero, Ira Diggs, Michael Watts, and Herbert Evans Jr. went on trial. Because of what a judge called the "time-bomb" nature of the incident, the trial was moved to Tampa. The defense was successful in obtaining a jury of six white males. After hearing conflicting versions of who did what from officers, some of whom received immunity in exchange for their testimony, the jury acquitted the four men. After the verdict the prosecution came under attack for not taking more time to investigate the incident, for granting immunity to some officers on the scene, and for not protesting the all-white jury more forcefully.

The Aftermath of the Verdict

The aftermath to the trial was predicted by the judge who moved the trial to another part of the state. Following what many thought was an unjust verdict, especially since several officers had testified that McDuffle had been beaten as he lay handcuffed and defenseless on the ground, rioting broke out in Tampa and Miami on 17 May 1980. The rioting was worse in Miami and resulted in the first large-scale urban riot in the United States in more than a decade. The Justice Building was broken into and vandalized; dozens of cars were overturned or burned; and many people, mainly white, were pulled from their cars and beaten or killed. The governor called out thirty-six hundred National Guardsmen to help restore order. By the time the rioting had ended three days later, sixteen people were dead and four hundred had been injured.

Source:

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Confronting Racial Isolation in Miami (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1982).

TULSA RACE RIOT

TULSA RACE RIOT (1921), one of the worst American civil disturbances of the twentieth century. Perhaps as many as one hundred people lost their lives, and more than thirty-five blocks were destroyed in the African American section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Greenwood.

The riots began on the evening of 31 May, when World War I veterans heard that a young black man being held in the Tulsa County Courthouse on charges of assaulting a young white woman might be lynched. The veterans followed the advice of a local black newspaper, the Tulsa Star, which encouraged them to take action to protect against a lynching. They put on their uniforms, got guns, and went to the courthouse. When some white men tried to disarm them, shots were fired, and the riot

started. The police department hastily deputized several hundred men to help put down the "Negro uprising."

Around dawn on 1 June the deputies and Tulsa-based units of the National Guard began to sweep through Greenwood, disarming and arresting the residents, then taking them to "concentration" camps around the city, ostensibly for their protection. Some who refused to give up their guns were shot. Mobs of looters, some wearing deputy badges or police uniforms, followed soon after. The looters took what they could and then burned the buildings. In later years, the Oklahoma legislature contemplated paying reparations to survivors in recognition of the wrong done them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brophy, Alfred L. Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa [Race] Riot of 1921—Race, Reparations, Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Alfred L.Brophy

See alsoLynching ; Race Relations ; Riots .