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On July 30, 1866, the convention commenced, with hundreds
of Confederate veterans serving as “emergency police
officers” and dozens of Black men, many of them Union
veterans, marching through the streets in support of the
proposed changes. As tension continued to grow between the
two groups, a shot rang out. Armed to the teeth and better
prepared for violence than their counterparts, the White mob
began attacking the Black marchers. Lucien Jean Pierre Capla,
a witness to the violence, later recalled: “I saw the people
fall like flies.” (Capla and his son were both brutally
attacked, suffering incredible wounds.)
When federal troops finally showed up, more than 40 Black
men were dead, with over a hundred wounded from the
fighting.
3. Opelousas Massacre
For the White Democrats in Louisiana, 1868 was a tough year.
Thanks to the votes of recently freed Black men, Republicans
won a vast majority of the elections that year. Faced with
the prospect of losing their stranglehold on local and state
politics, many racists, especially those in the Knights of
the White Camellia (a pre-cursor to the KKK formed to stop
Republican successes at the polls through intimidation)
began violently oppressing all the Black people they could
get their hands on. Similar to the KKK, the Knights of the
White Camelia was a White supremacist terrorist organization
and they were extremely popular in the St. Landry Parish.
(One Democratic newspaper estimated nearly one in four White
people were members of the group.)
On September 28, 1868, as the U.S. Presidential election was
beginning to inch closer, a local newspaper editor was
beaten. Around a dozen Black men came to his aid and they
were subsequently arrested; however, they were later dragged
out of jail and lynched. This was just the start of the
violence that night: armed White people began scouring the
countryside for every Black person they could find and
murdering them as soon as they did. By the time the violence
subsided a few weeks later, somewhere between 200 and 300
African-Americans were killed. Republican Ulysses Grant won
the presidency against the anti-black Democratic contenders
Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair.
4. Thibodaux Massacre
Less than two decades after slavery was outlawed in the
United States, many African-Americans working in the South
began to realize the power their labor represented. This led
to an increasing number of strikes, especially amongst sugar
workers. In 1887, some sugar workers reached out to the
Knights of Labor, the biggest union of them all. With the
help of organized labor, the Black workers soon began to
demand appropriate wages.
Instead of negotiating, the plant owners began firing union
members. When strikes began, they also hired strike-breakers
and created militias, armed to the teeth and out for blood.
On November 23, a mob of White men dragged a number of Black
workers from their houses and led them to the railroads.
Once they arrived, the men were told to run for their lives,
before they were all shot in the back by the armed mob. By
the time the violence died down, at least 35 people had
died. Defeated and cowed, the workers all went back to the
plantations and not one person faced justice; in fact, one
of the murderers even won a seat in Congress the following
year.
5. Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
On the morning of November 10, 1898, a throng of some 2,000
armed White men took to the streets of the Southern port
town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Spurred on by White
supremacist politicians and businessmen, the mob burned the
offices of a prominent African-American newspaper, sparking
a frenzy of urban warfare that saw dozens of Blacks gunned
down in the streets. As the chaos unfolded, White rioters
descended on City Hall and forced the town’s mayor to resign
along with several Black aldermen. By nightfall, the mob had
seized full control of the local government, some 60 Black
citizens lay dead and
thousands more had fled the city in panic
6.
Atlanta Race Riot
Fearful of the growing power of the Black citizens of
Atlanta, the White elites in the city began using the local
newspapers to push their racially motivated opinions. The
governor’s race of 1906 was especially repugnant, as various
newspapermen utilized their positions to help their
campaigns by spreading false information about the state
of race relations in Atlanta. A favorite of theirs: any
lurid tale of a “pure” White woman being assaulted by a
Black man.
No one particular story sparked this riot but tensions rose
to a breaking point on September 22. Eventually, White mobs
began terrorizing majority-black neighborhoods, setting fire
to any black business they could find and beating and
shooting those unlucky enough to cross their path. By the
time a heavy rain dispersed most of the crowds; the state
militia had showed up and restored order. However, small
pockets of violence remained for the next two days and, in
the end, as many as 40 African-Americans lost their lives
7. The Red Summer
Less an isolated incident and more a collection of
similarly-themed violence, the Red Summer took place in
1919, as numerous African-Americans adjusted to civilian
life after having returned home from WWI, alongside their
fellow White veterans. Famed civil rights activist W.E.B. Du
Bois said of the Black veterans: “We are cowards and
jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal
every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner,
longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in
our own land.”
Faced with men who were no longer willing to live under Jim
Crow laws, many Whites began to assault random Black men
throughout the country, especially those who had fought in
the war. Though much of the violence occurred in the North,
as the Great Migration dramatically changed the demographics
of a number of major cities, the largest instance of
violence occurred in the small town of Elaine, Arkansas. For
three days, unspeakable violence was meted out to Black
sharecroppers who were trying to improve their working
conditions; over 200 men were murdered.
8. Ocoee Massacre
Colloquially known as a “sundown town,” a phrase which was
used to illustrate to the black visitors to the city they
were not welcome once night fell, Ocoee, Florida was once
the site of a horrific amount of violence. For nearly a
year, after World War I, voting rights activists had been
encouraging the Black citizens of the state to exercise
their right to vote and many of the White citizens began to
see it as an attack on their supremacy.
On November 2, 1920, a relatively wealthy African-American
man named Mose Norman tried to vote but was turned away.
Members of the KKK even took a gun away from him, a weapon
he had brought to protect himself, and ordered him to go
home. Later that day, a mob of Whites, many of them KKK
members, traversed the black neighborhoods looking for
Norman before eventually deciding to head to the home of
another prominent Black man: July Perry. Eventually, they
captured him, lynched him and burned his neighborhood down.
The terror wrought by the mob was so great that Ocoee turned
into an all-white town for decades.
During the 1920 census, around 500 black People called Ocoee
home; in 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970, every census taken
revealed there to be no Black citizens at all.
9.
Tulsa Race Riot
Unlike some of the incidents on this list, the Tulsa Race
Riot can be traced to one specific incident: on May 30,
1921, a 19-year-old Black man named Dick Rowland was accused
of attacking a 17-year-old White elevator operator named
Sarah Page. He was quickly arrested and the local police
began an investigation. However, newspapers fanned the
flames of racial violence by publishing more and more lurid
reports about Rowland’s actions. Two separate mobs, one
black and one white, descended on the courthouse, determined
to either protect or kill Rowland, respectively.
Outnumbered, the Black mob headed back to the Greenwood
district, an area known as Black Wall Street because of the
concentration of black businesses. Out for blood, as many as
10,000 white people crossed the railroad tracks in pursuit
of the fleeing African-Americans. As dawn broke, nearly 35
whole city blocks had been burned to the ground and at least
300 Black people had been killed. In an especially violent
twist, Tulsa was likely the first American city to be bombed
from the air as at least one local company was said to have
allowed the white mob to use their planes to drop burning
turpentine balls from the skies
10. Rosewood Massacre
A small, overwhelmingly black town in Florida, Rosewood was
essentially completely destroyed in January of 1923. In the
nearby town of Sumner, a 22-year-old White woman named
Fannie Taylor was heard screaming and, when her neighbor
came to check on her, she was covered in bruises. Claiming
to have been assaulted by a Black man, she reported that she
had not been raped, though the other white citizens in her
town believed otherwise.
Her husband gathered a group of Sumner residents and began
searching the area for a bBack prisoner who was said to have
escaped a nearby chain gang. Additionally, around 500
members of the KKK were in the area and they joined the mob
which eventually decided the town of Rosewood was hiding the
target of their ire. Eventually, they reached the town and
began terrorizing those they suspected of aiding the escaped
prisoner, beating, torturing and even killing some of them.
After some White people were killed by those defending
themselves, the choice was made to burn the town to the
ground.
In all, anywhere from six to 27 Black people were killed,
with the rest escaping with their lives but none of their
possessions, as many of them refused to return to the area,
fearful of more violence.
In the white supremacist novel, The
Camp of the Saints, promoted by Trump’s senior
advisor and speechwriter Stephen Miller, the white world is
destroyed at the hands of a Black/Brown mob. The book says
they are the children of “the beast,” or Satan’s beast in
the Book of Revelations, from which the novel draws its
title. Its heroes call for the slaughter of the Black and
Brown characters: “If only he’d go the next step, and tell
them to shoot, tell them to blast the crowd to hell!” and
“No hope, Mr. Mayor. Unless you kill them all, that is.
It is time for all white progressives and moderates to
actively root out the racist revanchism which runs so deep
and that has over the past four years fissured America,
deformed policy and civic life, and that now buckles the
very foundations of our nation.
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