Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Shakespeare Riots

WYTS: New York Giants. Original post here.

Does every single riot in American history have its route cause in structural racism? No, but most of them do. Anyway, here’s a funny riot, one that’s (mostly) not racist at all. “Funny” is relative because we have somewhere between 20 and 30 deaths. Am I making light of this too soon? But how many riots are about Shakespeare actor fandoms? Turns out that was a really big deal back then, like how Swifties might murder you today if you say her Toy Story 5 song is boring. This is the Astor Place Riot of 1849.

Astor Place held held the stately opera house theater in Lower Manhattan, designed in a Classical Revival style. It was a literal temple to the arts. Built in 1847, this was where New York’s best and brightest, the “Uppertens”, as in upper ten thousand, would enjoy their theater, hopefully away from the rabble. America was growing rapidly in the early 1800s and NYC was booming too. In this era, we had some pretensions of genteel high society, inspired by the English gentry. Class divisions extended everywhere. Your Uppertens and middle class merchants supported the Whig Party, which is really confusing if you know your Tories and Whigs from England. (We get everything backwards in America.) The lower classes and immigrants had Tammany Hall's Democrats. The usually ruled the city and were violently angry to be out of power right now. There was a brief blip of Whiggish mayors at the end of the 1840s. Anyway, these divisions even extended to Bill Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare wrote for the masses in the Elizabethan Era, and his popular appeal had not dimmed centuries later in 1849. These shows were mass entertainment. Hamlet was like Cats. Unfortunately, that meant that guys with silk hats had to be in the same theater watching the same Othello with groundling dockworkers and drunks sneering at the actors. Thus the Astor Place Opera House tried to enforce some “class” in two meanings of that word. America had also not yet won its Civ Cultural Victory over the planet, so we were very insecure about our place versus England. People wanted to prove we were just as good as them, no matter how un-posh our accents.

In that spirit, rose the first great American Shakespeare actor, Edwin Forrest. He was young, energetic, and looked like Billy Joe Armstong. He was good enough to tour the motherland, getting to meet William Macready the Younger, one of the great English Shakespeare actors at the time. The rivalry writes itself, you have the upstart hero, Forrest versus the European snob, Macready. Somehow this also became an Uppertens versus ramble question, with the hardscrabble gangs supporting the American, and the high society figures such as Herman Melville supporting Macready.

The friendship between these two actors soured during Forrest’s second tour of England, where he had worse reviews and felt he had been set up to fail by Macready. And scandal of scandals, Macready did not invite Forrest over to his house! The gossip rags went wild on this point, making a meal out of Forrest vs Macready, USA vs England, Uppertens vs Bowery Boys, Whigs vs Democrats, Astor Opera House vs Broadway. William Macready came to Manhattan in 1849, and as if to push this rivalry to its limit, both men decided to play Macbeth on the same night. The Macbeth Bowl was on.

Unfortunately, Macready had a very bad show on May 7th. Maybe he was the better Macbeth, but nobody could hear him over the din and jeers as gang members took over the fancy theater. Forrest’s supporters paid extra to fill Astor Place and tossed everything they could at the English actor. “Down with the codfish aristocracy!” came some heckles. Macready was ready to flee the town, but was convinced by New York’s best and brightest to try another show. This was a bad idea. I’m hoping he was paid well. Everybody knew a riot was coming, the militia were already in the town, the battle lines were drawn at the curtain rose.

May 10th, 1849, Macready must have said “Macbeth” in the Astor Place Theater, because this show could not have been more cursed. It was far worse than before. 10,000 people showed up around the theater. It was so loud the cast only finished the show in pantomime. The audience could not hear a word, but to the cast's credit, they seem to have finished The Tragedy. Meanwhile, outside, the opera house was under siege. The actors had to slip out in disguise, and the New York militia was in battle with the mob. 70 cops were hurt, 250 people in total injured, dozens dead. The police would be better-armed next time there was a huge riot in the city, which was about once a decade in this era. New Yorkers loved a good riot.

After this Macbeth run, the press called Astor Place, “DisAstor Place” and its reputation as a theater never recovered. It closed within a few decades. Condos sit in its place today. William Macready never played in America again. Edwin Forrest never played England again either. His career ended some years later due to gout and a real nasty divorce scandal. Forrest whipped a writer in middle of Washington Square Park for sleeping with his soon-to-be ex-wife. He was a colorful character.

Shakespeare, however, is still going strong in Manhattan. I've seen Macbeth performed in NYC myself, that was done by Patrick Stewart, and the crowd loved him. Hot take but I think Stewart's Macbeth was better than these other two.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Holy Week Uprising

WYTS: Tennessee Titans. Original post here.

Well, we have a sad one: The Holy Week Uprising. Not all... or even most of these are going to be fun. We'll have fun with the next one.

On April 4th, 1968, 6:01 PM, Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most important people of the 20th century, stood on the railing of the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Somewhere across the street, holding a Remington Model 760 rifle was a thoroughly unimportant person whose actions this evening did not make him anything more than the nothing he was. Dr. King was in town for a labor strike, fighting for the black sanitation workers to win the right to unionize and be paid more than a $1 an hour. (It is almost like there is some kind of connection between labor rights and racial justice, ...nah, silly thought...) A shot rang out, and a bullet shattered King’s jaw, lodging itself into his shoulder. King knew this bullet was waiting for him. "This is what is going to happen to me too” he had told his wife in 1963, after JFK’s murder, "This is a sick society".

 

The strike in Memphis had been going on for months. On February 1st, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were two sanitation workers caught in the rain. Since Memphis was segregated, they had nowhere to hide except in the back of their truck. Somehow the compactor was turned on when the machine malfunctioned. They died horribly. A similarly grisly incident had happened in 1964, but Memphis did not care to fix anything. By February 11th, many of the sanitation workers, who were nearly all Black, stopped showing up for work. Soon enough, there were thousands of tons of trash on the streets of the city, piling up. Mayor Henry Loeb, a proud segregationist of the old school, began to hire strike breakers and scabs, causing more violence. King arrived later in March to help organize resistance. 

 

On March 28th, there was the largest single action of the strike, where 22,000 people marched through the streets of Memphis, many of them children skipping school. The march became disorganized and chaotic, some protestors began to loot stores, just what Loeb wanted. A heavy-handed police response caused the march to collapse after just a few blocks. A sixteen-year-old, Larry Payne, was blown away by a shotgun blast to his stomach by a Memphis police officer. The AME Church in the area, the Clayborn Temple, was hit by teargas as many protestors fled inside for safety. It was another horrible scene of many in the Civil Rights era.

Circling back to the 4th, King survived the ambulance ride to the hospital, but was pronounced dead an hour later. He had worked for another five years of inevitable martyrdom to save this sick society. He had famously fought for non-violent change. The segregationists in this country had made an unmistakable statement that non-violence was not going to be enough.

There actually does not seem to have been much rioting in Memphis itself this night. If there was any, it was tiny, just minor incidents. Mayor Loeb put the city on curfew and called in troops. Whatever happened there was nothing compared to that terrifying week that followed with civil unrest in over 100 cities at once. The level of anger in the country in the Sixties is hard to believe today, no matter how bad the takes on Twitter might look. Back then, it must have felt like the world was ending. The Holy Week Uprising was just a year after the "long, hot summer of 1967" which had 150 riots (watch this space). Some cities were able to avoid the worst of it, a heroic spur of the moment speech by Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis, settled things down. But it was very bad in a lot of places.

Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City were the towns hit hardest. During this week there were 43 reported deaths, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of arrests. It would take the force of 58,000 armed National Guardsmen to settle things down. This during the Vietnam War, as if the Tet Offensive had come home. For many white families, this was the excuse they needed to flee the cities, and the excuse they needed for much darker political options. For Black rioters, I'm not sure how else they could have responded to King's murder. There are neighborhoods in Washington DC that did not recover for thirty years. There’s simply too many cities, too many people, too many stories to cover, and I don’t have the time or research skill to do it all justice. As this series goes on, we'll explore more of them in better detail.

Bobby Hutton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party was assassinated by Oakland police on April 6th. This only increased the legend of the Black Panthers, who would be a major force for the rest of the decade.

Governor of Maryland, Spirow Agnew, did such a shit job handling Baltimore's riot that he became a bit of a star with segregationists. As if his neglect was bravery. Richard Nixon needed those votes, and thus, found his running mate. One more bullet for Bobby Kennedy later in 1968, plus some more chaos in Chicago made Nixon's path inevitable. ...But that's a story for another time.

President Johnson, already a lame duck, wanted to solve the underlying causes of these riots versus just beating back annoying voters. Imagine a politician wanting to do things, versus telling his own voters they're nagging too much - it's wild how badly the Democratic Party has degraded over the decades. He used the pressure of King’s murder and the riots to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act portion of this law has been one of his best legacies, creating the modern HUD public housing system. But Johnson's successors would never give the program the funding it needed, and urban decay continued. The depressing thing is that the 1960s were actually better than what was coming down the line for many Black urban areas.

However, on April 16th, Mayor Loeb gave up. The optic of fighting against labor rights that America's greatest saint had just died for was politically unfeasible. The Memphis Sanitation Workers won their union and pay increase. I don't know if the garbage trucks continued to kill people.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bisbee Deportions & The Bisbee Riot

WYTS: Arizona Cardinals. Original post here.

Our history lesson today is about the town of Bisbee, Arizona. Currently, it is a former mining town in the southeast corner of the state. Its population has halved in the last century, now down to under 5,000 people. I do not expect you to know of it, it is not a place of much importance anymore. But Bisbee has a lot of history. We actually have two events, one in 1917 and another in 1919. There are The Bisbee Deportations and The Bisbee Riot. 

 

These civil unrests are the byproducts of World War I, a war which ended poorly for everybody involved. Three empire fell, and even the winning side was left in terrible shape. If anybody can be said to have "won WWI", it was the United States, whose global rivals were in ruins and the US was the dominant superpower for the rest of the century, whether we liked it or not. And even we left that war with a decade of reactionary conservative and racist politics, the repercussions of which we still suffer from now. To get to President Harding's vision of "Normalcy" required a lot of violence on both the labor and racial fronts. Bisbee, interestingly, had a big labor battle right before a racial battle, possibly a clue that race and labor concerns are directly related. We'll explore that idea further as this project continues.

 

Bisbee was a town of about 10,000 in 1917. It was a major source of copper thanks to its open pit strip mining operation, the Copper Queen Mine run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Copper, being a strategic war material, was a very turbulent commodity in the market. Prices were going up and down all over the place. Miners had their wages tied to the price of copper, so you'd never know if you'd be going hungry from one week to another. The workers wanted a better deal. This was a really dangerous, unpredictable, and pardon the pun, extractive industry, where foreign Slavic workers were usually mistreated. The miners wanted $6.00 per hour, the company wanted them to literally drop dead pulling out the copper ore. There are many, many big mining labor battles in this era, and battles are the correct term. Broncos fans (such as myself), watch this space.

In 1917 the miners went on strike, daring the company to do their worst. Their worst they got. Phelps Dodge responded by making the local sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler, basically military dictator of the surrounding county. He cut off all communications to the outside. On July 12th, 1917, during a labor action, Wheeler gathered a posse of 2,000 men and then grabbed 1,300 people off the streets. Most of them were strikers, some were supporters, some were just random people watching the show. The sheriff loaded these thousands of people onto cattle cars and dumped them in a random spot 200 miles away, leaving them with their lives and nothing else. It is possible they were all expected to just die out there in the desert. Luckily the state of Arizona and federal government did rescue everybody, with only one death reported. The workers were at least alive, but they were not welcome back in Bisbee. The strike was broken.

Cut to summer 1919 where labor tensions, unsurprisingly, have not cooled off. Turns out trying to massacre your employees does not end disputes forever. But there's more! WWI is over and a lot of black soldiers are coming home, scaring the bejesus out of white America. President Wilson, a guy who's racial record was... let's be nice and call it "mixed", did not do the greatest job in terms of integrating his men back home. Instead many black soldiers returned to the Red Summer, a series of pogroms across the country. These included incidents as varied as major urban riots in Chicago, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. There was a particularly horrible incident in Elaine, Arkansas where maybe as many as 240 people were murdered.

 

The Red Summer was not the same thing as the Red Scare, just to clarify. That was a separate anti-Bolshevik panic coinciding with major strike waves across the country, much of which involved the coal industry, to return to mining. We did win WWI, but the economy had been wrecked and people were very unsure of what would come next. Oh, also the Spanish Flu epidemic is ravaging the country too. 1919 is just one of those years like 1848 or 1968 or 2020. Just a real bad time.

In Bisbee, on July 3rd, a group of Buffalo Soldiers from the 10th Cavalry had come to town to take part in the Independence Day Parade scheduled the next day. The 10th Cavalry had not traveled to France, but this is a very distinguished unit, they fought in the Indian Wars and saved Roosevelt's ass on San Juan Hill and fought in the Philippines. That night they got a tip by some IWW Union organizers in Bisbee that the local police were planning to attack them. We don't know what was planned since it none of it went to plan. I should note that Sheriff Wheeler is no longer in power, he had gone to France to fight Germans and was a little busy with some legal troubles I'll get back to. The problem now is Bisbee Chief of Police, James Kempton.

 

Instead of an easy repeat of the Bisbee Deportations from 1917, we have the Bisbee Riot, where the 10th cavalry were in a full-on gunfight with the sheriff department in the town, in an area called Brewery Gulch, a red light district the local soldiers enjoyed. This is event is sometimes called The Battle of Brewery Gulch. They were not going out without a fight at least.  After a few hours of shooting, around midnight, the Buffalo Soldiers realized this could not go on forever. They surrendered and disarmed themselves, but not without regrets. One unarmed soldier was shot in the chest by a deputy just for fun, seemingly. The whole event probably had been staged to give the cops an excuse to murder the 10th Cavalry, though I do not think they expected this fierce of resistance. The next morning, Chief Kempton and the County Sheriff gave up and let everybody go home.

Now this could have been a lot worse, if not for the fact that agents of the Bureau of Investigation were in town. They were here trying to catch the IWW as Bolshevik agents undermining America. Instead they realized this town was a nightmare run by an evil corporation and a lynch mob police force. The feds actually helped defuse the situation. 

 

In the riots there no deaths, just the previously mentioned injured soldier and one poor bystander lady who was shot in the head. Nobody was punished on either side. 

 

Sheriff Wheeler, though, for his role in the Bisbee Deportions, faced federal charges. However, the Supreme Court decided in 1920 that the US Constitution does not protect citizens from being kidnapped, even if that means being rounded by a sheriff and left to die hundreds of miles from help. That's a matter for state courts, not federal.

Phelps-Dodge is now part of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and is still mining copper to this day around the world. If you'd like, you can buy some shares right now!

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The New York City Draft Riots

WYTS: New York Jets. Original post here.

There’s a lot of history in New York, and we’d need a lot more NFL teams to cover every single big riot in this area. There's at least five important ones that deserve their own entries. I regret not picking Stonewall for one of the two I covered in retrospect... Maybe we need a bonus episode at the end.

One of the two riots was the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, one of the largest civil unrest events in American history, maybe the biggest, unless you count the Civil War itself. You might remember this riot sabotaging the ending fight between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, a Scorsese movie too good to be spoiled by a terrible DiCaprio performance.

Through its history up until the Civil War, New York always had a… complicated relationship with slavery, let’s say. It was a major slave trading port in the 1700s. One of the first riots in American history happened right here in 1712 when about 23 African slaves attempted a revolt for their freedom, only to be shot down, and many were executed in horrible manner by being burnt on the stake. A second riot happened in 1741, which either was an aborted slave revolt or just an imagined conspiracy that got out of hand, which also ended in mass executions. After the Revolution and slavery's ending in New York, the city had no problem doing business with the cotton plantations, making a lot of money in the process. Lehman Brothers, the infamous 2008 Great Recession bank, got started as a cotton trading firm before moving to NY in 1858, for example. These trading ties were so important some business leaders wanted New York City itself to secede as a neutral free city when the Civil War broke out.

Meanwhile, as Scorsese and DiCaprio teach us, there was a huge immigrant population, especially important being Irish immigrants. The Five Points were an infamous slum, so infamous that European tourists would take a visit as part of their American vacations, notably Charles Dickens. The Catholic population, largely Irish, were expanding rapidly in 1840s, thanks to the famine at home, and this brought all sorts of social troubles. You have the gangs of course, .DiCaprio's Amsterdam character did not actually found the Dead Rabbits, they a major Irish gang well before then. They would have their biggest battle with their rivals, the Bowery Boys in 1857, a riot that killed 8 people. (There's a lot of riots in NYC! Did I mentioned that?) Many cities on the East Coast in 1800s had these sorts of gang problems, especially in Baltimore, we'll circle back to this later, get hype, Ravens fans. 

Tammany Hall, the political machine that is noted as one of the most corrupt in American history, actually did a lot to create a place in NYC for these people. I think Nativist bigotry ended up writing a lot of the history on the old-style political machines. You could be right off the boat but still have a personal relationship with a person in power who could affect change for the better. Which made a lot of the older Protestant "natives" very angry. You could do a lot worse in the vast and varied unseemly history of American politics, let's say. Also, it is not like New York got less corrupt after the machine politics ended, just the government started working for business interests, not voter patronage.

We must mention that there was a large free black population in Manhattan of about 12,500. That is not enormous in a city of 800,000 plus, but their position at the bottom of society was now a radical question thanks to a war over slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the rise of the Republican party. Republicans were in opposition to Tammany Democrats. There was a lot of fear in NYC that newly-freed slaves would suddenly crowd into Manhattan and weaken the job market. Racism does not need a logic, but labor concerns are a major factor in all of this. (We'll get back to this a lot.)

July 1863 is a huge month for Civil War nerds: Lee is invading Pennsylvania, itching for a fight he’s going to lose, Grant is closing the noose around Vicksburg, and the third major battle is right here in Manhattan. Tensions have been broiling in the city since March, when Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first wide-national conscription in American history. Before this, Union Army regiments had been either volunteer or conscripted by their local states (we won't really have the uniform federal army you recognize today until the 20th century). The Civil War was not terribly popular in NYC by either the immigrants or the older WASP crowds, and it is not getting more popular with an impending draft event on July 11th. Copperhead Democrats became increasingly furious that New York will have to sacrifice itself further for a Republican and anti-slavery war. Newspapers begin publishing hysterical anti-war and very racist screeds - never a good sign for civil unrest incidents. 

Most importantly, the city's garrison is very undermanned as they had some problems on Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top to deal with.

The first day of the drafting actually went fine,. It's the second day of drafting, July 13th, 1863, where the city exploded. This is an interesting event for a lot of reasons, one of which is many of the rioters were Irish, but so were the police, the heavily-Irish and brand new Metropolitan Police led by Superintendent John Kennedy (not that one). By the way, this police force had only been in existence for a few years, they had a full-on gang battle with the older Municipal Police Force in 1857 - there are many many riots in NYC's history. 

But let's focus: the revolt starts at about 10:00 AM on a Monday at 3rd Ave and 47th Street, in the NYC 9th Provost building. This is actually to the north of the famous Five Points. The Five Points, despite what the great historian, Martin Scorsese tells us, did not really get that involved in this event. Lower Manhattan had some chaos, but the fighting was centered in Midtown. About 500 angry men, led by a fire engine company nicknamed the Black Joke, start throwing rocks and paving stones through the windows. They smash into the draft, taking control of the room, burning everything. The volunteer firefighters have ironically become arsonists, the whole building burns down. They also fight off any other firemen who come by. Superintendent Kennedy arrived on the scene with his Metro Police. He's recognized even out of uniform by the rioters, and Kennedy is nearly assassinated, with 70 stab wounds. At this point, the mob begins a march around the city, just destroying whatever they really felt like. The city's arsenal fell by the late-afternoon.

Their targets during these riots were numerous and diverse. Most tragic would be the Colored Orphan Asylum on 44th Street, which was a major charity organization. The 237 orphans were able to escape thanks to the police fighting back the mob, but the building was looted and burnt down. The offices of the abolitionist paper, The New York Tribune were also destroyed. The pro-Republican, New York Times (what else has changed, am I right?) survived thanks to Henry Raymond, its founder, personally defending the Gray Lady with gatling guns, first appearance of these weapons, not the last. A lot of this also just became an old-fashioned racial pogrom, with random black people lynched and hanged, one poor man was set on hanged and set on fire. The black tenements by the waterfront were burnt. The white wealthy were not spared either, especially if you were a known-Republican. Brooks Brothers was looted.

Fresh Union troops would not make it to Manhattan until Wednesday, the 15th. Lee's army had retreated back into Virginia, ending any farfetched hope of a Southern victory, so troops were available to recapture Gotham. These new soldiers began pushing into rioting areas. By Friday there were 6,000 soldiers in the city and the Draft Riots were crushed. 

The final death toll in in dispute. Some reports say just 18 deaths, which sounds impossibly low. Another has 120, but then you'll find wildly high numbers like 1,200 killed. Ultimately, nobody knows and until very recently, whatever casualty numbers you read from civil disturbances or other kinds of disasters are going to be total guesses. These estimates are usually on the low-end as the governments involved undercount people they do not care about. I would not be that surprised if the death toll from the Draft Riots are well into the hundreds. It was very bad, the worst riot in New York's history by far. And there were a lot of riots.

One part of the story I was unhappy to learn was how successful this pogrom actually was. The black population of Manhattan dropped to pre-1820 levels, several thousand left and never returned. Many of the survivors migrated to Brooklyn or other areas. You can still see these racial lines in Manhattan today. Bobby Womack's 'Across 110th Street' is a banger and an accurate picture of the demographic lines even today. Harlem was not even settled yet in the 1860s, that would be a brand new development when it had its Renaissance in the 20th century. 

The planned draft that sparked this whole riot actually was completed a few weeks later without incident. President Lincoln appointed General John Dix to make sure New York City finished its conscription process. In the end, fewer New Yorkers got drafted anyway than the panicked Copperheads imagined. The South lost the war, in case you didn't know, and New York just kept on making tons and tons of money without needing a slave economy to drive its engines.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1969 West Las Vegas Riots

Preface: 

This all started as a gag. Defector is doing their annual roast of the 32 NFL teams, from worst to best. I'm a very heavy commenter there, I've written short fiction in the comments and occasionally shorter movie reviews that are not worth full publication. Seems like people tolerate my brand of nonsense reasonably well, I've gotten decent upvote scores. For the last couple of years, I've been doing series in the comments of 'Why Your Team Sucks' entries, last year it was short biographies of the worst Americans I could find from each city featured. Let's Remember a (Real Bad) Guy featured people like our traitorous, deeply incompetent General James Wilkinson or arch racists like Hoke Smith or extremely obvious picks like George W. Bush. This year I'm doing Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest!, which are stories about riots, strikes, or just one flat-out military battle in or around each city the football team plays in. Usually these are parts of a city's history that almost nobody remembers, parts of American history very powerful interests would prefer we not think about. They were supposed to be like 300 words max and just real short, informative, sometimes humorous things.

Instead this blew up rapidly and nearly all of them are about 1,500 words or more. They got longer quickly. My weakness as a writer is that I will either write nothing at all, or I'll write way too much. Many of these events were too awful to really keep a humorous tone about, just felt like these under-explored elements of history needed detail, and as accurate of reporting as I could give. It is a ridiculous amount of work to do, especially with a demanding full time job and long commutes, so this is amateur work done quickly and admittedly sloppily. I did get to use my BA in History for something at least. But these 32 riots/battles actually do come together to make a halfway decent history of race and labor relations across 200 years in this country, just out of order. If you ever want to know where my politics come from, it's from knowing about events like these.

Also, people kept asking for an easier way to find them. A lot of comments were like "this is great, how do I find the other ones?" So I'm reposting them here, with some revisions, I did make a few factual errors I want to correct. This first one for the Las Vegas Raiders was done very quickly so it is largely rewritten. The other 31 will come out over the course of the next couple of weeks. Original post can be found here.https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52ahttps://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-las-vegas-raiders?commentID=09f6ffa3-3e8e-4511-934d-d6098233a52a

... 

America's history is littered with some real unpleasantness and a great deal of it has been forgotten or ignored. Today's subject would be better-remembered if the Raiders still played in a real city like Oakland, but since they moved to a theme park in the desert, we will instead cover the 1969 West Las Vegas Riots, a much more obscure event.

There have been thousands of riots in American cities. In the 1800s, they were very diverse and could be about anything from Shakespeare to vegetarianism to labor tensions. We'll get to many of those stories. But in the 20th century, especially after World War II, riots began to take on a very familiar pattern. We could easily cover 32 events exactly like this one about the same things. I don't want to do that because it will be repetitive and depressing and maybe even pornographic at a certain point. I will cover the major ones such as Detroit (get hype, Lions fans!). But as you read this, know there is a century of history of undesired peoples in urban areas, brutalized by ever-more aggressive policing, and at certain points this explodes. People can easily mock these riots as self-defeating and "destroying their own homes", riots are not usually praxis. They are societies breaking down and do not need to make sense, also there are two actors in a riot: the rioters and the police. Explosions don't just happen, they are made to happen.

 

1969 West Las Vegas is just an example, but just know: this has happened everywhere.

 

Vegas was a boom town through much of the 20th century, and of course, this is America, so even into the middle of nowhere, we need to export our segregation. "The Mississippi of the West" is what the NAACP called Vegas. At first it really was like a Southern colony in the desert. A lot of the mobsters founded it were from an infamous bootlegger lawless resort city pre-Vegas, what is nicknamed "the Free State of Galveston". Galveston being Texas, and that means Jim Crow. Infamously Sammy Davis Jr could perform in Vegas, but was not allowed to say in the hotels. He could sing about gambling in Ocean's 11, but due to his skin color, he could not actually play craps at the Sands or the Riviera. The Civil Rights Movement had to extend this far out into the desert as well and would fight to integrate the main casinos in the 1960s.

 

But what we think of as Vegas is technically unincorporated land in a legal fiction called Paradise, Nevada. It also does not represent the entire city at all. Westside Vegas, on the literal other side of the train tracks, was the poorer, less developed area. It was the black neighborhood neglected by the city, in some cases lacking electricity or plumbing. There was a brief flourishing of a rival "Black Strip" around Jackson Avenue. It had a few nightclubs inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and smaller casinos modeled on "Vegas" (still technically Paradise). However, these businesses seem to have struggled. A very ambitious integrated casino in 1955 called the Moulin Rouge Hotel floundered that same year. People really wanted to make something better of West Vegas, but it never happened. Post-integration, the Black Strip really had no reason to exist. The entertainment venues declined, and this area only kept getting worse.

 

By the late-60s, the country was deeply on edge, and we'll cover a lot of the reasons why. There have been two major waves of urban riots in '67 and '68. African Americans everywhere feel harassed by over-policing and redlining and the predictable problems of the mid-20th century.

 

Today's event begins on Oct. 5th, 1969, when the police pull over a speeding taxi driver in Westside. One of the cops is actually black himself, Robert Arrington, which is rare since police forces were overwhelming white in this era. Meanwhile, a local black man named Gerald Davis just happened to be outside fixing his mother's car and sees his buddy, the taxi driver, in a bad police interaction. Davis probably should not have gotten involved. But when he did, the cops took this very personally. They followed Davis back to his mother's house nearby, saw that he had a legally-owned firearm, and decided to violently arrest him. Then they stormed inside, macing everybody, including his Mom. At this point, 150 onlookers are watching what is a snowballing situation. They begin to chant and protest, since all of them are familiar with this pattern of intimidation and cruelty. This goes on for hours, simmering, but not quite a riot yet. The evening ended with a tense stand-off, hundreds of cops and protesters focused at a strip mall around the corner. The police do retreat, trying to not set this off worse than it has.

 

However, the next day, the 6th, the riots seem to have truly begun. Two white men drove into the strip mall and were beaten by the protestors. The rioters armed themselves with molotov cocktails and were in open revolt against the Vegas police. There is the usual pattern of looting, sniping at police officers, and almost 40 blocks of the city in chaos. The battle would rage for about two more nights, with two deaths on the 8th, both involving an attempting robbery. At this point the West Vegas riots seem to have lost their energy and peace was restored. The mayor never needed to call in the National Guard. It could have been - and was - much worse in other cities.

 

It is very difficult to find sourcing on this riot, there is not even a Wikipedia article on it. I was able to confirm details with local newspaper reports from the time. I am reasonably sure this is accurate. Some events are better-remembered than others. You will find a Wikipedia article on the West Vegas Riot in 1992 in response to the Rodney King verdict (get hype, Rams fans). West Vegas did not feel any better about its place in the social structure decades later. I've been to Vegas a couple of times, each time I stepped off the Strip it felt like I was in Fallout, so I imagine this is still a very rough area.

 

Anyway, 31 teams to go. I'll keep reposting these.