Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1917 Houston Riots

WYTS: Houston Texas. Original post here.

The Greater Houston area is prone to explosions. Texas City likes to turn ships full of ammonium nitrate or towers full of oil raffinate into massive fireballs about once every fifty years. In today's story, the explosion is more a metaphor for racial tensions. This is the 1917 Houston Riots.

Three years into the Great War, faced with an unwinnable situation, Germany decided to gamble with Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and bring the United States into the party. This was extremely stupid, so stupid that Germany would repeat this blunder all over again in the 1940s, having learned nothing. In 1917, the US was the richest nation in the world, and had been propping up the Allied Powers for years with loans and shipping supplies. On April 2nd, President Wilson declared war, the first time the American military would sail to Europe to fight a major global power. Its army was untested for modern war, but sheer numbers alone would make a major difference.

Houston, being a major port city, was intimately involved with all of this. WWI was incredibly disruptive to the entirety of American society. It would require the mobilization of the entire nation, and the nation has its own problems, which trench warfare was not going to make disappear. Where is Houston again? Oh yeah, Deep Deep South: you can see where this going.

In 1917, Houston was a booming city (sometimes literally) and the oil industry was only just getting started. It had been untouched by the Union Navy in the Civil War and had not too much difficulty enforcing segregation after Reconstruction. The city had been undergoing a major engineering project to widen and deepen its shipping channel, making it a more and more strategically important place. Since Houston was the biggest port in Texas, it was going to be home to a lot of newcomers about to go off to Europe to discover how much fun you could have with the Kaiser's army in Belleau Wood.

Many of those soldiers were Black, despite the best efforts of Southern politicians to keep them out of the war. They knew Black enlisted men would disrupt this order. Near Houston, a new training base called Camp Logan was under construction in the spot where Memorial Park sits today. The 3rd battalion of the all-African American 24th Infantry Regiment, 634 men in total, were there on guard duty. Important note: even the military was segregated in this era as they made the world safe for democracy.

This Infantry Regiment had quite a history already. The 24th started off as Buffalo Soldiers in the still-Wild West. They fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898 and saved a politician on an ego-trip, Teddy Roosevelt from getting himself killed by Spanish defenders. Roosevelt called them "shirkers" after the fact as he wanted all the glory for himself. They would go on to fight in America's first or second "Vietnam", the war against Filipino guerillas, with four tours served between 1899 and 1911. Most recently, they had been part of the Pancho Villa Expedition. The ungrateful citizens of Houston were uninterested or unimpressed with their service record.

The 3rd battalion of the 24th sat on a gray line in the racial caste system, and lines are usually where violence is at its worst. They were Black in Houston, so in the eyes of Texas culture and law, inferior. However, they were soldiers in uniform, so inherently demanded respect. Arriving in July of 1917, these soldiers had to deal with all kinds of social problems: where do you sit on the streetcar? Can the Houston police still treat you as a child? Do you still ignore random slurs that are to be expected when you're just walking around? Their experienced commanding officer, Colonel William Newman, had already seen racial violence incidents. One of his men had been murdered by a Texas Ranger in April 1916. Unfortunately, Newman was replaced just two days before the riot by Major Kneeland S. Snow. A fresh new commander probably did not help the feeling of distrust and confusion. (Both of these officers were white, of course.)

On August 23th, around noon, two Houston PD officers, Rufus Daniels and Lee Sparks, were in the Black San Felipe neighborhood. They disrupted a dice game, and while chasing some suspected criminals, broke into the home of a woman, Sara Travelers. She had done nothing wrong, nobody was in her house, but still, the cops dragged her out onto the street in her sheer sleeping clothing, without shoes to humiliate her. One of the 24th Regiment soldiers nearby, Private Alonzo Edwards, got involved with the arrest, and the police beat him via a pistol whipping. A Corporal, Charles Benjamin, considered a goodie two-shoes model soldier, now got involved. You can see how this just keeps getting worse, these two cops pick the wrong option at every turn. Benjamin is also beaten, and as he flees, he is shot at three times (I'm unclear if he was hit). Rumors fly back at the base that Benjamin has been murdered by the police, when in fact, he's actually just been arrested. Everybody becomes panicked that a white mob might march upon Camp Logan, and they want to fight back first.

Major Kneeland, who again, has been on the job for two days, barely has time to figure out what is going on. He does not know whether Corporal Benjamin is alive or dead, or what is happening with his unit, before events get out of control. The Major tried to collect his soldiers' guns and ammo, but when wild rumors circulate, about 100 or 150 of them rush the weapons tent. Now armed, they march towards the city. Their unofficial leader became Sergeant Vida Henry, a Black non-com officer.

The 3rd Battalion now began a 2.5 mile fighting march to the San Felipe area. Along the way, they encountered a confused and unorganized Houston PD response. The cops expected just a few angry unarmed men, not a firing line of well-armed veterans, and they took casualties. One of those killed was patrolman Rufus Daniels, who had started all of this by breaking into Ms. Travelers' house in the first place. A bit of justice. After three cops were killed, the 3rd also killed a National Guardsmen, believing him to be of the HPD. Several civilians were also hit and died, including a white child.

Once they reached San Felipe, it seems the Battalion realized they had gone way too far and their situation was hopeless. Morale plummeted as it hit them they were now basically at war with the entire world, and they were not going to win this one. Sergeant Henry told the men he was leaving and would shoot himself. His body was found the next day. Some sources say it was self-inflicted gunshot wound, other reports make it sound like Henry was beaten to death. Many soldiers went back to base. Others just deserted and hid wherever they could around San Felipe. On the 24th, Houston was under martial law, and the police did a thorough search house by house to find every one of the rebellious 3rd Battalion members. The Army gathered the whole group and sent them by train out to New Mexico. Many would return to Texas to face one of the largest court martial trials in American history.

After the dust cleared, the death toll was 17 civilians, police or otherwise, and the 3rd Battalion took five dead, mostly by friendly fire.

In San Antonio, during the next few months, there were three separate trials for 118 men charged with mutiny and rioting. 110 were convicted. 19 of the soldiers were hanged. On December 11th, 13 soldiers were hanged at once. War justice is brutal justice. President Wilson commuted another ten death sentences on August 31st, 1918 to merely life in prison. Patrolman Lee Sparks, the other cop that started everything, was acquitted of all wrong-doing.

Quickly, the Houston Riot became an embarrassing mark on the US military’s history, even for the ultra-conservative 1920s. Calvin Coolidge made several soldiers eligible for parole. FDR released the last ones in the late-30s. One of the released soldiers, Roy Tyler, would be a professional baseball player in the Negro Leagues in the 20s, but only for a little while. Tyler ended up serving time in Leavenworth a few years after gaining his freedom, ending his career. On November 13th, 2023, a century late, the Army posthumously overturned all the convictions.

The 24th Infantry did not go to France. They would continue as a segregated unit into the Korean War, where they distinguished themselves with hard front line fighting until 1951. It ceased to exist once the US military was finally 100% integrated, the last all-Black unit was dissolved in 1954. A new Regiment by this number was created in 1994.

More importantly for Black soldiers immediately after WWI, 1919 would see a host of troubles in the Red Summer, as Black veterans had their second-class citizen status beaten back into them. The 10th Cavalry, who had also fought in Cuba with the 24th Regiment, were nearly massacred in Bisbee,Arizona, if you remember that story from many episodes ago. Wikipedia calls this era "the nadir of race relations in the US". White supremacy was never more certain of itself and its power to inflict violence with impunity.

Now in 2026, the current civilian leadership is doing their best to erase all history of Black service in US military history. They’re threatening to rename the USS Doris Miller, a war hero, after Donald Trump, who is… as far as I know, not one. These policies are on their face pro-segregationist. There is an active effort to turn the clock back to this awful era.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The San Francisco Riot of 1877

WYTS: San Francisco 49ers. Original post here.

Okay, we’ve covered all kinds of bigotries so far, everything from Anti-Black to Anti-Polish. Who is next…? Hmm… Ah, we’re in California again, and you know what that means! Severe racism towards Chinese immigrants! ...I should not have such a peppy tone about this, it's really bad. This is the San Francisco Riot of 1877.

Our story begins in Qing China in the 1800s, which was… having a rough time of it, let’s say. Thanks to overpopulation, outside imperialism, ethnic strife, and deep calcified corruption in a royal court so backwards it made the Romanovs look like Maoists, China went from being the mightiest empire on the planet to nearly carved up by the European powers in the span of just a century. Some of the wars happening within China in this era are not well-known but also are amongst the bloodiest in history, such as the Taiping Rebellion.

For America, the ethnic civil wars between Cantonese and Hakka peoples within the Guangdong region around Hong Kong are important. Over a million people died in this war that even I had never heard of before researching this. (This is all very complicated and well outside my knowledge base.) A large population of the Pearl River Delta left to settle around the world starting in the 1850s, one of those destinations being California. Most immigrants spoke a dialect called Hoisanese/Taishanese, which is distinct from Mandarin or Cantonese. That was still the main lingua franca of American Chinese communities until the mid-20th century.

Speaking of that century, things got much worse for China in the 20th century, ho boy, the Century of Humiliation is a loooong one. But that’s another story.

California in the 1800s was a big wonderful land of opportunity. Almost as soon as we conquered it from Mexico, we discovered gold there. If you were a 49er heading from the East of the US, your routes were not easy. The overland mountain wilderness or sailing around South America were roughly as comfortable a journey as going across the entire Pacific. Chinese migrants arrived slowly at first. There were a few in 1849, less than 1,000 before 1851. But after 1852, these numbers quickly jump to 20,000. Then around a hundred thousand by the mid-1870s. As the Gold Rush tapered down, many of these new immigrants found work on the Transcontinental Railroad.

California was a state by 1850, and only eight years later it was trying to ban all people “of the Chinese or Mongolian races” from entry. The State Supreme Court pointed out that California actually did not have the power to decide what happened at the federal government’s international border, and that was struck down. (Red States have been trying similar tactics lately.) But the fact the law happened at all, and stood in place for four years, even if poorly-enforced, shows us that there’s already a problem.

At first, Chinese migrants were welcomed with relative decency. As they began to arrive in vast numbers, the novelty turned to xenophobia. Yellow Peril was rampant in the 19th century – these newcomers had everything going against them, being as foreign as any human being could have been to their white neighbors. There had been very little direct contact between European and Chinese cultures prior to the Opium Wars. They weren’t Christian, they spoke a language nobody knew, nobody knew or cared about their history, and they were from a very poor, war-ravaged region of the world. Also, most of the migrants were male, like 20:1 or more disparities in the Californian Chinese migration. If you've ever seen Deadwood, you'd remember that white guys were throwing around all kinds of now-adorable-seeming antiquated slurs.

In San Francisco, the ethnic enclave neighborhood of Chinatown is almost as old as the city itself. The first mayor, John Geary, welcomed 300 Chinese people to the city personally on August 28th, 1850. Many of these pioneers left to work as miners or on railroads, but many stayed put and became shopkeepers and laborers. This is where American Chinese food was invented. Many also worked in another industry with a low barrier to entry: laundries.

One major issue is that Chinese immigrants were prone to all the issues of a single gender area: crime, prostitution, drug use, general dirtiness. Frontier life, basically. But while many white woman followed the men to California, turning it "respectable", that did not change for the Chinese community. There was even a brief Bubonic Plague epidemic in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1900. By the late 1800s, the neighborhood was already a tourist destination for people to go look at the exotic crime-ridden area. (Similar to New York’s Five Points earlier in the century.) In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which in theory was to stop the "yellow slavery" of prostitution rings, but in effect simply banned all Chinese women from entering the country.

Now racism doesn't need a justification, but would you have guessed that there was a major labor rights element to all of this? Chinese workers were stereotyped as industrious and also very cheap. They were at the very bottom of Californian society, roughly on par with African Americans, so would they take wages nobody else would. Californians had grumbled for decades, but this would become a national issue. In 1870, a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts was the center of a labor strike, which was broken when the managers imported 75 Chinese laborers. Suddenly Chinese "coolies" were now seen as a semi-human race of scabs and the burgeoning labor rights movement turned very hostile to them.

In 1876, a reported 20,000 people in San Francisco gathered in a vast Anti-Chinese rally. All through the decade the newspapers were writing fearful Yellow Peril headlines. The Chronicle had a story entitled "The Chinese Invasion! They Are Coming, 900,000 Strong!" You might remember that earlier in the century, the Know-Nothings had a similar panicabout Catholic immigrants. Well, the Anti-Chinese movement was considerably more successful.

In 1877 the same long Panic that had gripped the East finally made its way to the West, economic depressions taking a lot longer to move around back then. San Francisco had gone through a few boom and bust cycles, as mining industries rose and fell. In 1877, the city had a population well above 200,000 people, roughly 10% Chinese. 20% of all men were out of work. And so the various other laborers despised their Chinese competition. You see, destroying an entire group of rival workers could indeed be seen as a pro-labor action, it has a ruthless supply and demand logic - this bizarre mixture of blue collar and racist concerns is a potent brew even today.

On July 23rd, an early socialist party, the Workingmen's Party, planned a rally at the sandy lots in front of SF City Hall. (All this is gone now, burnt down in the 1906 earthquake disaster.) They were responding to reports that Pittsburgh had erupted into chaos as the Great Railroad Strike was attacked by Tom Scott's militia... you might remember this story if you're reading along. The Workingmen's Party organizers tried to keep things on topic, but much of the crowd were bored and hecklers yelled: "Talk about the Chinamen; Give us the Coolie business!" By the evening the socialist rally was a dud, but the crowd had turned, seemingly on their own, into an angry mob marching towards Chinatown.

For the next two days, San Francisco endured waves of anti-Chinese pogroms. The mobs would rise up, burn several Chinese businesses, especially laundries, and then be dispersed by the police and volunteer forces. They'd gather to attack local white-owned businesses like the lumber yard or the steamship company or the mill, anywhere that had been employing too much Chinese labor. Actually, SF did rather well in response to this ethnic assault. The local municipal government did everything it could to repress the violence. The mayor, Andrew Jackson Bryant, a political opponent of Chinese immigration, formed a Committee of Safety. That sounds very French Revolution-y to me, but it was an ad hoc militia that beat back the rioters with hickory pickax handles and baseball bats. (Like the opposite of Ax Handle Saturday's mobs.)

By the 27th, most of the violence had cooled down, only one more Chinese laundry burnt down, progress! There was a threat that this might spill over to Oakland or nearby cities, but major riots did not occur. A couple old Civil War warships entered the harbor on the mayor's invitation to try to dissuade any further violence. 4 people were killed in total, including a Chinese business owner who suffocated inside his own burning building. A further fourteen people were injured, and quite a lot of property had been damaged.

Now while the pogrom was not a brilliant success in terms of destroying San Francisco's Chinese population, it was the curtain rising on a new wave of Sinophobia. There would be Anti-Chinese riots all across the US for the next decade, mostly in California, but there was a major one in Denver in 1880 and even a small one as far away as Milwaukee in 1889. The California branch of the Workingman's Party pivoted hard towards Anti-Chinese racism. A new leader, Denis Kearney, would make fiery demagogic speeches at the same sand lot outside City Hall, ending them all with his catchphrase: "And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!" Kearney would end up, of all things, a stock broker guy, making a random fortune before his death. He had lost whatever anti-capitalist roots he had in his hatred and racism. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

Meanwhile, across politics, the Anti-Chinese movement would have triumphant successes. In San Francisco, they tried to ban Chinese laundries with an explicitly discriminatory ordinance banning wooden laundries. In a surprise twist for a very conservative Gilded Age Supreme Court, that was struck down in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins in 1886 as a violation of the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile on the national political level, the federal government had to toe a line between racist populism and geopolitical ambitions with China. In 1882, we have the infamous Chinese-Exclusion Act, ironically passed just as the Statue of Liberty was being constructed. It was the first major barrier to immigration enacted by the US government. That was supposed to just last for ten years, but was extended in 1892, and the US banned nearly all Chinese immigration to the country until the 1950s.

The Chinese Court did not protest too heavily. They needed whatever friends they could get while Russia and Japan were trying to tear the Empire apart limb by limb.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is how you get such lovely federal organizations like the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, and was the predecessor to ICE. Forty years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 was a glorious victory for the anti-immigration forces. Now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people whose only barrier to entry was a boat ticket and not having typhus can complain online about foreign hordes raping Lady Liberty. Millions of Jews in Europe had nowhere to escape to, and would be marched off to the gas chambers while America stayed "pure".

Many Chinese communities suffered demographic issues in the late-1800s with mostly male populations, limited immigration, and low birth rates. Denver’s Chinatown, for example, was down to just 110 people by 1940 and was torn down. Others survived and are among the most famous parts of their cities today. San Francisco’s Chinatown was destroyed in the fire of 1906. Despite attempts by the city to push them out, maybe move the whole ethnic group to Oakland, it was rebuilt on the spot. It’s still there today, it is a must-see place if you're visiting.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Attica Prison Uprising

WYTS: Buffalo Bills. Original post here.

Say it with me, folks: “ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!” This is the Attica Prison Uprising.

I’m not 100% a prison abolition guy - there are people who are too dangerous to be allowed to live free in our society, the majority of them are politicians. I am, however, somebody who never freaks out when a high-profile character “only” gets five or ten years in jail. However bad you think prison is, it’s probably much worse. This is a subject that gets depressing very quickly. The American justice system is a burden of unimaginable bluntness designed to break people. It is all the worst parts of a bored unfeeling bureaucracy mixed in with the extra cruelty of psychopaths on every level of the system on a power trip, from judges to guards to various thugs in public office. Then there’s grifters and profiteering and obvious corruption. Penal work is the kind of labor that corrodes a person’s soul. The soil around a prison is more haunted than an Indian burial ground.

Attica Correctional Facility was opened in 1931, an imposing fortress in Western New York, about 35 miles east of Buffalo. It was state-of-the-art, terrifying, and encased in a gray thirty-foot-high wall, a mile in length. A castle of despair. This outer wall is two feet of solid concrete, too tall and thick to need barbed wire. All around are twelve guard towers, built like castle turrets. The main structure of the complex is a 2x2 grid with four yards, prison cells at the perimeter. In the center point is a control area called “Times Square”. The prison had been designed to house 1,200 souls, but by the Seventies, it was horribly overcrowded, with 1,000 more people inside than it should have had.

Serving time in Attica was serving hard time. You’d spend something like 14 hours each day locked in your cell, get a single shower a week, one roll of toilet paper a month, and you were expected to earn your keep: a quarter an hour wages for slave labor, which even in 1971 was beyond bad. I don’t want to imagine what this place smelled like.

Most of the inmates were African American or Latin American, from the urban areas, and the guards were nearly entirely white and from the vast farmland nowheresville that is Upstate New York. Attica became one of those great American confluences of race and labor problems. Many of the prisoners were Muslim and received no accommodations for their faith. All the inmates were subject to vast levels of abuse, including sexual abuse. Also, the food was bad, the medical care was bad, this was dehumanizing to the point of being illegal even by 1971 standards. Not that anybody could do anything about it, because they had very limited access to the outside world. Attica kept increasing the repression as prisoners became more vocal of their displeasure. Prisoners had no legal services, censored communications, no training or education opportunities, not even a library. When prisoners sent requests for relief, the warden, Vincent Mancusi, just cracked down harder to stop any political activity.

Oh, you remember around 2010 we realized that solitary confinement was like… nightmarish and actively a form of torture? Yeah, this is 1971, you’re going in the Hole in Attica.

Every few years there’s a moment when reactionaries get furious about how “good” prisoners have it and then subject them to sub-human treatment again. “Oh my god, they get to eat food?? How dare they be allowed to ever have a normal life again??” This is a cycle that will repeat forever thanks to our rotten political and media cycles. Usually, it is a clue that the person you’re talking to is a complete asshole, who has never read any research on what violent prison conditions actually do to people and societies at large. You can probably distrust anything else they have to say. Pay attention to what happens in New York under Governor Hochul, as opposition makes her weasel back the unfinished criminal justice reforms. The only force in society worse than a police union is a prison guard union.

Anyway, back to our story. Attica sucks and is part of a reckoning the entire country is undergoing as part of the civil rights movement. The prisons across the NY State penitentiary system were feeling all that energy, prisoners were often part of the leftist movements outside. There was a wave of riots across NYC’s jails and in Auburn Correction Facility (in picturesque Finger Lakes Wine Country!). In Manhattan's jail, The Tombs, five guards were held hostage for eight hours on August 10th, 1970, until the mayor negotiated a peaceful settlement. But the city failed to live up to its promises. Several rioters were subject to brutal reprisals once the jails went back to order. So if prisoners do not surrender easily in the future, remember why.

Many inmates who saw these smaller events were sometimes shipped off to Attica to relieve the pressure of the prisons they were in already. There is the example of an Anti-War bomber named Sam Melville who was at The Tombs during the hostage situation and later would die at Attica. He had his own underground prison publication called Iced Pig (great name). By summer 1971, the correctional officers union was getting spooked and felt the situation would eventually explode. And while they took no responsibility for their part in that problem, they were right.

In August, news reached Attica that prisoner activist and Black Panther member George Jackson had been killed during an escape attempt at San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was the writer of Soledad Brother, a memoir about the justice system and its racist, capitalist origins. (I should read it one day.) He had been in jail since 1960 for robbing a gas station at gunpoint, then given an “indeterminate sentence”, meaning no set ending. For the crime of stealing $71 bucks, the state had condemned this man for over a decade of hard time. Finally, George Jackson with some compatriots tried a wild escape attempt using a smuggled gun, taking three guards and two white prisoners hostage. Jackson died after being shot in the back, all his hostages were murdered. Ugly story. More than half of Attica’s inmates engaged in a hungry strike in honor of their fallen hero on the 22nd. The riot would occur mere weeks later.

On September 8th, a fight broke out between two prisoners that ended with a few guards getting struck. Warden Mancusi demanded several inmates be locked away into solitary. Mancusi had become a hated figure in the prison, symbolizing all repression and censorship in the castle. One prisoner, William Ortiz, struck a guard with a can of soup, and was locked up in his cell. The next day, Thursday the 9th, the prisoners were agitated that Ortiz would be punished severely. At 8:20 AM, it all exploded. There was a fight as Ortiz's section marched off to the yards, the prisoners managed to break through into the central Times Square section of Attica, and soon they were tearing open the other three wings of the prison. There were 127 guards at the facility this morning, but there had been no plan to fight back against a full rebellion. And they had just lost the core of the structure.

By noon, individual actions and a state police response had recaptured a good deal of Attica. The prisoners lost the mess hall and kitchens, which meant very little food and very few supplies. Half the yards were in government control, the whole exterior concrete wall, and half the prisoner population were still in cells. The other half of the Atticans were, for now at least, free. The rebels largely focused on their side, B and D blocks, with a camp built in D Yard. They had 42 officers and other staff as hostages, forcing a stand-off that would last for days.

William Quinn, a guard who had taken severe injuries in the opening melee, was carried over to the administration building on a mattress, where prisoners begged for him to get medical attention. He'd pass away two days later - the only guard to be murdered by the prison population. Three other prisoners would be killed in the various chaos, but all the other dead to come would die from bullets. The prisoners of Attica had no guns. Important detail for later.

During the next four days, leading to Monday morning, the prisoners did as much as they could to make their D Yard village livable. They also dug trenches and built fortifications. Most of the hostages were well-taken care of, though their lives were bargaining chips. The Atticans organized a list of about 33 demands, mostly simple things like better food, access to legal council, ending censorship. They also had more ambitious goals like a labor union, that the hated warden Mancusi be fired, and all prisoners be given amnesty for the uprising. The state officials laying siege to Attica would make other claims like the prisoners were demanding to be flown out of the country. NY State Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald visited the prisoners and agreed to many compromises, then went on the radio and made a different statement. The prisoners realized he was a liar, and they never trusted Oswald again. Now they wanted to speak directly to the Governor, Nelson Rockefeller.

Governor Rockefeller never appeared at Attica. He stayed far away from this toxic situation. This was a media circus and there is a lot of footage of interviews with prisoners if you want to watch it. I recommend the Attica documentary from 1974, by Cinda Firestone. Many of those men would be dead within days.

Early Monday, at 8:25 AM, Commissioner Oswald demanded the Atticans release their hostages and surrender. He'd compare what happened next to being akin to Truman deciding to drop the A-bomb. Oswald did not mention that this was the last warning or that it would be enforced with infinite violence. Eight hostages were led up to the catwalk by the rebels in mock execution to show they were serious. That's when the State of New York retook Attica. At 9:46 AM, state troopers, Attica guards, and various local law enforcement opened fire with rifles, shotguns, and even a couple AR-15s. Clouds of gas filled the prison, which meant many shooters had no idea who they were firing at. Some ringleaders though may have been targeted for execution specifically. Within minutes dozens of people were dead, hostages and prisoners alike. Several prisoners died trying to surrender. Hundreds of men had been shot, 8 hostages were killed immediately, one died later, and 29 inmates were dead. The state claimed the hostages had been murdered by the Attica rioters, but almost immediately coroners reported that this was a shameless lie. Everybody had been killed by bullets, by the authorities.

The work of recapturing Attica was not quite over though. The prisoners had surrendered but their spirit had not been broken. Many had to strip naked and crawl through glass and mud and their own latrines. Or they were forced to run the gauntlet. There sure were a lot more bruises appearing days after the battle was over, doctors noticed.

Warden Mancusi retired in 1972 at least.

In 1976, the new Governor, Hugh Carey, pardoned everybody involved with Attica's uprising. He announced that the “book was closed”. The full report of what life was like in that prison was classified for decades. New York State made some major concessions, such as allowing these guys to have daily access to soap and toothpaste, or granted them their right to practice their religion. Still in the 1980s and 90s, when politicians wanted to look "tough on crime", a lot of these positive changes were reversed. The prisoners were demanding a way back to civilization and to be treated as people. Instead, they were treated as easy targets by cynical politicians, with mandatory minimums, ending education access, and much much worse overcrowding.

Every single day the American prison system is home to some appalling injustice, and this is supposed to be completely normal. We wonder how we got to Alligator Alcatraz. A state fetish for violence only leads to… well, lots of good times and puppies for everybody? Right?

New York had about 12,000 people locked away in cells in 1972. That peaked at 70,000 in 1999, now down to about 32,000. Attica is still open and still being used as a prison. It will celebrate its 100th anniversary soon.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1968 Democratic National Convention

WYTS: Chicago Bears. Original post here.

What else are elections for except something to get mad about for the rest of your life? You want to argue about 2016 again for the millionth time? Well, there's lots of elections to be upset about. This is the 1968 Democratic National Convention Riots. When the Anti-War movement went too silly, the Chicago PD got too brutal, and Nixon laughed his ass off watching from inside his coffin in his doom castle.

Prior to the 20th century, the American political system was allergic to direct democracy. We did not elect our Senators, we had the Electoral College, and we did not even pick our candidates. The party insiders and bosses and their business friends would select our options in rooms that were literally smoke-filled. Primary elections were a new thing in the mid-20th century and were only part of the story, really just theater. The bigwigs had final say, and most states did not have proper primaries yet. Conventions were not coronations like now, they actually decided who would be the guy. Sometimes a dude would go to the convention, like James Garfield in 1880, and learn they had to clear their calendar for the rest of the year, because turns out Jimmy G. is running for president.

1968 was going to be a rough year no matter what happened. I’ve mentioned before how wild this year was, but more context is always helpful. The Tet Offensive in January put a lie to claims that Americas has a “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam, and thus the anti-war protests become an unceasing furious scream. Really the entire world seemed furious. You have a wave of college protests everywhere, with students seizing their schools in NYC, in Italy, in Japan, in Egypt, in Mexico, there’s a near-revolution in Paris, there’s the Prague Spring, the Troubles are getting started in Northern Ireland, the Cultural Revolution in China is still going on. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinatedin April and the entire country was hit by a wave of riots.

There had not been a year like this since 1848. I’m not sure any year since has been this disruptive, this near-apocalyptic, not even 2020.

Even the Republican National Convention in early August had a drama. The liberal Nelson Rockefeller briefly allied with Ronald Reagan in a unified front against Nixon. And that’s a wild counterfactual: imagine President Reagan in ’68, we’d be in World War III before the Beatles broke up.

The Democratic Convention at the end of August, set to happen in Chicago, was doomed to pandemonium. Even with the Segregationists out, following George Wallace to his distressingly-successful third party run, the party was deeply divided and had no obvious leader. President Johnson had easily beaten Barry Goldwater in ’64, thanks to correctly implying that Goldwater was going to start a nuclear war. But four years later, four years of ugly Vietnam battles later, Johnson had completely destroyed himself as a political brand. He was stung by how well Eugene McCarthy, governor of Minnesota, had done against him in the first primary in New Hampshire. LBJ then shocked the nation and the party by dropping out of the race entirely on Mach 31st.

Now, luckily there was another charismatic Democrat in the wings, the brother of a sainted martyr of the nation, and he was anti-war. Robert Kennedy was the man American needed in 1968. And, oh crap apples, some guy just murdered him on June 5th... That left the Party without either LBJ or RFK, not one titanic three-letter name to rally around. Instead, the more hawkish faction was led by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had not bothered to run in the primaries, and he had the backing of the party elites. The anti-war faction was split between Governor McCarthy and Senator George McGovern, siding with the tens of thousands of furious protesters from the Anti-War Movement outside. The crowds cheered for the other guys, they were silent for Humphrey. But that did not matter.

To set the scene further, the Democratic National Convention from August 26th to the 29th was taking place in the power base of Mayor Richard Daley. Daley was a very powerful man, Chicago was his town, and he reigned from 1955 until his death in 1976. There are urban legends that he stole the election for JFK. He was an old-style party boss, maybe the last of his kind. And Daley wanted his big moment in 1968 as a host to go off spotlessly. This was televised and millions of Americans would be watching Daley’s city, his kingdom. Months earlier, Chicago had been rocked by post-MLK assassination riots, with 11 dead, also parts of the city were still in ruin. King Richard I would do anything to not have a second egg on his face… that went poorly for him and the city and really everybody.

There was a fear that maybe as many as 100,000 anti-war protesters might storm Chicago. They'd be communist revolutionaries or something. The actual number was way below that, only about 10,000, against twice their number of police and Illinois National Guard. The convention floor, within the International Amphitheater, was more heavily fortified than Saigon with several lines of checkpoints and barbed-wire. Even on the floor, there were delegates getting harassed by Daley’s thugs for not having enough identification. An already tense convention was made all the worse with a sense of being under siege the entire time, by the police as much as by the protestors.

As for the Convention itself, the protestors never got close to it. Any chaos there was all self-inflicted by the Party, not the freaky deaky hippie Yippie guys. (We’ll get to them in a minute.) There was little doubt that Humphrey would win the nomination if he played his part. But there was a big question as to what kind of candidate Humphrey would be. LBJ was at home in Texas, however he was at least as in control of events as Mayor Daley. The FBI was even tapping Humphrey’s phones. While Vice President Humphrey tried to find a more moderate pro-war stance, basically the “Vietnamization” retreat plan taken by Nixon anyway, that was never allowed to be the party platform. Instead the party plank would be full Hawk after a very intense delegate vote. That made the Anti-War Delegates furious. New York’s caucus marched around the floor in black armbands, singing “We Shall Overcome”, the Civil Rights protest standard.

Also, Johnson was secretly fantasizing about reentering the race. He wanted the right moment to be the party savior, which never came. Daley, meanwhile, wanted Ted Kennedy to run. Turns out there was no surprise twist, no guest star reveal. It really was going to be herby-ol' Hubert, and nobody was happy. Least happy was Daley, who got to have his city used as a metaphor for oppression and imperialism. When Senator Abraham Ribicoff said as much in his speech, Daley is reported to have yelled out “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” He had the Senator dragged out by his thugs.

Reporters Dan Rather and Mike Wallace got into infamous fights with security guards. It was that kind of affair.

Anyway, then there’s the street riots. As mentioned, the Anti-War crowds were way below expectations. Mayor Daley seems to have believed the worst would indeed happen, taking at face value every ludicrous claim given by the clowning kids in the Anti-War Movement. For example, Humphrey’s other big candidate rival was Pigasus the Immortal, a pet 145-pound pig owned by the Youth International Party (Yippies). I'm not saying that Pigasus wouldn't have made a great president, but he kind of tells you what kind of absurdist politics were at play against Daley. I don’t have the greatest respect for these guys, they made real leftist grassroots political organizing look like a joke, or a phase young dudes did for grass and ass until they grew up. The Yippie leaders such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin made jokes about dumping LSD into Chicago’s water supply, or “seducing” politicians’ wives.

The planned protests were never violent or even had a specific ideology, this would not end in a Chicago Worker's Soviet. And maybe that's why the Boomer revolution never actually amounted to anything other than partying – Rubin would end up a stock broker, for example, miserable fucking generation. But just the idea of an ad hoc music festival and some Alan Ginsberg poetry was too much for the Chicago PD.

If say, Chicago had done nothing, they might have proven how weak the counterculture Anti-War movement actually was. It all started poorly when on August 22nd, a 17-year-old hippie named Dean Johnson fired a revolver at the cops and was blown away. The protestors planned some big demonstrations for Johnson’s death but it amounted to nothing. Pigasus’ nomination only had 50 people attend. (He seems to have gotten a bigger crowd in the photo above.) On the 23rd, the Women’s Strike for Peace was also a dud. If there was indeed a Silent Majority like Nixon would say, maybe this was proof. However, CPD violent crackdowns would transform a disappointing turn out into the trial of the century, and these comedians into freedom fighters.

For the first few days of the Convention, the Anti-War protestors would encamp up in Lincoln Park, and were routinely beaten out of there by the police, enforcing an 11 PM curfew with gas attacks and riot sticks. On the 28th, the protesters were encamped in Grant Park, just three miles away from the Convention, with intentions to march on, hopefully to affect an Anti-War vote. The police fought back. Several skirmishes took place as protestors kept trying to raise flags to half-mast or replace the American flag with a red T-shirt. Finally, the protestors tried to break apart and leave, but with thousands of people in the Chicago parks, they could not go anywhere without appearing to be marching. They could not stay or go, without a police boot kicking them down.

Some protestors decided instead to march upon the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which was the Democratic Party HQ was in the city, and where Humphrey was staying. It was luckily also right there by Grant Park, just a block away. This led to the single biggest brawl of the entire week, as protestors tried to get across Michigan Ave, and it all descended into chaos. The police, after days of beating up these hippies, snapped. They could not take any more. What followed was the "Battle of Michigan Avenue", 17 minutes of violence and total disorder right in front of the news cameras, many reporters caught in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind of hatred, leaving the scene covered in blood. Vice President Humphrey was in his room and his eyes were hurt by the clouds of tear gas filling the city. He could hear the protestors chant “the whole world is watching” as the rioting police went mad.

In the aftermath of the police riots, the Democratic Party could have not come away looking worse. Only one person, Dean Johnson, had been killed, but hundreds were injured, hundred had been arrested, and 89 million people had seen it happen on TV. Indeed, the whole world was watching.

Eight protestors were singled out by a federal show trial, in the infamous Trial of the Chicago 8. This crew included both Yuppie Founders, Hoffman and Rubin, along with student protest leaders like Tom Hayden, and most significantly, Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party. Seale's part in this story was that he made a speech in Lincoln Park and later his Panthers were attacked by police in improvised tanks. He'd be gagged and bound during the trial, and then later tried separately anyway, reducing the group to the Chicago 7. The whole event was an obvious farce of justice, supported by a new President, Richard Nixon, and none of the convictions stood for long. Seven Chicago PD officers charged of police brutality were acquitted.

You might have noticed, yeah, Nixon won. Humphrey was a sauceless figure during the Convention and remained one through the general election. It was very close so it could be that the chaos on the streets of Chicago in fact ruined his campaign. Also, Nixon had been treasonously sabotaging LBJ's peace talks behind the scenes with South Vienamese contacts. The Vietnam War would drag on for another seven years. US troops left in '73, and South Vietnam collapsed with shocking speed two years later. All of it was for nothing. Decades of Republican rule in the White House later and the Keynesian liberal wing of Democrats like Johnson and McGovern were gone forever, now turned into boogie men to scare away moderate politicians from daring to imagine they could affect major changes. No more Great Society, just welfare reform.

The Boomers finally took power and turned out to be a horrifically conservative generation in the end. They didn’t stop the Vietnam War and only went on to go create new Vietnams all on their own. On that thought: fuck Forrest Gump.

At least we have primary elections now to choose our candidates… well, usually…

I don't know what happened to Pigasus after his failed presidential bid. The legends say that the Chicago PD ate him.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! Ax Handle Saturday

WYTS: Jacksonville Jaguars. Original post here.

(Mural is on the Eastside Brotherhood Club on A Philip Randolph Blvd in Jacksonville, FL.)

 

Maybe once the Jaguars finally move to London, we can discuss the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. But for now, they’re in Jacksonville, and there's plenty we can do with that. This is Ax Handle Saturday.

I feel like I’m on Jackass with these intros: “I’m Johnny Knoxville and this is Ax Handle Saturday!”

With our Civil Unrests, we’ve had a sloppy, out-of-order history of race relations in the US. We’re missing a major chapter in this tale, which is the Civil Rights Movement itself. We last saw the South post-political coups in Atlanta and Wilmington, with the violent imposition of Jim Crow upon its citizens. That situation could not last forever, as the political alliance between pro-business conservatives and racist lower classes was always tenuous. Both major parties had left and right wings and eventually one was going to turn hard against Jim Crow. Also, it was just embarrassing during the Cold War. The US was engaged in a global battle to control the destiny of the human race. Which vision of modernity would dominate: classical liberalism or communism? Which “end of history” is going to reign forever after? You’re saying you're the leader of the “Free World” with all this segregation bullshit? 

No, the global Empire needed to look clean and both major political parties by the 1960s were distancing themselves away from all this.

In 1939, one of the first Sit-In Protests took place at the city library in Alexandria, VA, just south of the US capital. This saw Black patrons dare step over the color line. Five men were charged with disorderly conduct, but never convicted. Similar protests in the next decade occurred in Columbia, NYC, Chicago – Northern cities, you’ll notice. In 1954, after Brown v Board of Education, Sit-Ins became much more common. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a Sit-In at a drug store chain called Read’s in Baltimore in 1955, successfully integrating the chain. This quickly became the common tactic of non-violent protest between CORE and the NAACP and other famed organizations, usually by students, often extremely young students, and it was very effective. Gandhi - with some good geopolitical luck thanks to a couple World Wars - had torn down the British Empire with these kinds of saintly protests.

Anyway, we're talking about Jacksonville, not the most exciting or important place in the country then (or now). It is named after a president who brought war to this place in the early 1800s. It was one of the few places in Florida to see much action during the Civil War, the Union captured it a few times. By 1960, Jacksonville was a city of a little over 200,000 people with an important navy base. Alabama and Mississippi would be the most famous battlefields of the Civil Rights Movement, but Jacksonville had the same problems of any other Southern city.

The stage for our drama is Hemming Park, named after a Confederate soldier and spy, Charles C. Hemmings. The park had a 62-foot-tall Confederate monument and was a kind of informal center of Jacksonville near the courthouse, and importantly, the lunch counters. (City Hall is here now, but in 1960 that was more retail space.) Woolworths department store was here, so was a chain called W.T. Grants, and a cafeteria chain called Morrisons, all serving whites-only. They seem like cool retro-chic places based on the 1960s photos, but you don’t see in the exterior shots that they were deeply segregated. Black patrons could not even try on shoes or hats at these places, you had to buy them off the rack and hope they’d fit, or find a good cobbler. God help us if a white man might accidentally touched Black flesh even second-hand.

On August 13th, 1960, students appeared at lunchtime at the various eateries and sat down, openly defying the color barriers. This was the classic move, smashing the social norm and forcing the store or the city to respond. They spoiled a lot of white people’s lunches, waitresses had no idea what to do, and patrons walked out in disgust. During the next two weeks, the sit-in protest continued, with the response turning from confusion to violence. The protestors were spat at, called all sorts of things, some guy stabbed at their backs with his walking cane. On August 25th, Richard Parker, a white college student and an NAACP member, was targeted by a small mob in Woolworths, seemingly planning to lynch him. Parker was pulled out of the store by a supportive Black gang, the Boomerangs, saving his life.

Saturday, August 27th is the date that lives in infamy… or not really, Ax Handle Saturday is still relatively obscure. The White Citizens Council (as racist as it sounds) had met a week earlier, plotting to stop these Sit-Ins however they could. Eventually the KKK became involved – yes, the KKK, they’re finally here! I know you’ve been waiting for them and now, over 20 stories deep, they get to be direct characters in these riots. We know this because the FBI was monitoring the Klan at the time, along with monitoring the Civil Rights Movement. They had an informant, Clarence Spears, who reported that violence was coming. The Bureau passed the info to the Jacksonville Police, and then at the next Klan meeting, Spears had to sit with his best Poker Face on because his Klan buddies were suddenly aware they had a rat. Spears would quit his informant job soon after this.

Jacksonville PD apparently had one cop in the area the afternoon the riots began. And that’s pretty incredible since the courthouse then was only blocks away.

Ax Handle Saturday got its name because the crowd of about 200 angry white men gathered with ax handles. Just the wooden parts, they left the ax heads at home, this would have been way worse otherwise. They also had bats, just any blunt object made out of hard wood. Many of these guys were KKK members but I could not verify if any of them wore their robes to the event, I’m guessing it’s not easy to do battle in those things. They gathered in Hemming Park and then went off to brutalize as many Black youths as they could find. They charged into the stores to beat the counters back into Whites-Only sections. But really nobody was safe whether they were at the Sit-Ins or not, random people on the street were just as likely to be attacked. Some of these protesters were as young as 13 and were beaten to the ground by red-faced adults.

As the police arrived, suspiciously slowly, they did little to stop the violence, or even joined in with their night sticks. The Boomerangs, that gang I mentioned a few paragraphs back, put up a decent resistance and fought back, allowing many students to escape. Once the African Americans were able to hold their ground, the police swooped in and began making arrests.

It is hard to get exact details on how long this lasted. There were close to 100 injuries, no deaths thankfully, and dozens of arrests. About 4:1 majority of those arrested were black, who had done nothing wrong. The main battle around Hemming Park seems to have only lasted at most hours, but random violence and attacks around Jacksonville went on well into the night, maybe into Sunday. Richard Parker was one of those who got arrested, charged as if he was the mastermind of the riot. He was then sentenced to 90 days in prison. He spent some time on a chain gang and some racist fellow prisoners broke his jaw in reprisal.

By the way, this one of those stories where the good guys win. In 1961, despite all the ax handles in the world, the lunch counters in Jacksonville were integrated. More Sit-In Protests would happen across the South, especially once the Freedom Riders got going in 1961 and soon the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the end of Jim Crow.

In 1964, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, Jacksonville had to integrate its water fountains at Hemming Park. By the late 80s most of the big stores had been lost to White Flight and shopping malls, one of those vacated stately retail spaces is now the City Hall right by the park. There was also a big problem with an invasive species, the European Starling, which according to Wikipedia conquered most of downtown. I’m unclear what that means. Maybe flocks of rabid starlings were devouring Duval-ians alive, reducing them to skeletons in mere seconds as a grisly decoration by the Monument, I dunno. The city pulled down trees and put up concrete. That goofy Jacksonville Skyway monorail built in 1989 has a station there. I’d like to ride that before it is inevitably shut down to be replaced by a terrible AI taxi system. That's probably going to fail too and Jacksonville will be left with buses as its only public transportation.

In 2020, having a park named after a Confederate dude was looking increasingly gross, so Jacksonville renamed the space after James Weldon Johnson, an early 20th-century NAACP leader. The Confederate Monument was torn down too. Trump and his ilk have been fighting to get those things back up, so watch this space.