Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1967 Detroit Uprising

WYTS: Detroit Lions. Original post here.

We do not have time for joking in the intro. This is a really important one. The 1967 Detroit Uprising.

In June 1943, Detroit exploded with violence and rage. There was a rumor that a Black mother and her baby had been thrown into the river by a white mob. That fantasy set the city off, white and Black rioters attacking each other. 3,500 federal troops had to come in to restore order. By the time it was all sorted out, 34 people killed. Still, like most riots we’ve covered, everything mostly went back to normal after this. Detroit kept on booming. This riot was largely forgotten.

A generation later, with most of the problems in the city unresolved, the next rounds of battle would be even worse. And this riot would be televised. This would not be a historical footnote.

The early 20th sees Detroit becoming Motor City, a shining capital of an empire of steel. The new auto industry was a marvel of modern industry. Detroit’s assembly lines were the envy of the planet, a pillar of the Arsenal of Democracy that would spoil Hitler’s dreams. The city needed labor and needed it fast and paid well for it. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South, where Jim Crow and sharecropping offered no hope of a future, to go north and settle in this growing Michigan mechanized paradise. Ford Motors knew that a racially diverse work force was also a less organized work force, they could always play their Black and white workers off each other. Black workers in Ford got a miraculously good deal, very fair wages.

Unfortunately, we can never stop being ourselves, even in a glittery new city of modernity. “The past is never dead”, said a writer I don’t care for. Color lines came to Detroit just as they came to every other part of America. By the time of the ’43 riot, 200,000 Black Detroiters were locked away in the city’s East Side, in places like Paradise Valley or Black Bottom. A new Black housing project in 1942 was met by white marchers burning crosses – the KKK was active here too.

Daily life in Detroit in the years leading up to the '67 Riot was a constant reminder of your skin color, in every aspect of life. The police were 97% white. After the whites took down their burning crosses, the more subtle system of Redlining limited Black access to much of the city and importantly the suburbs. The good jobs were already moving out of the city as America atomized and industry left city centers. Black workers could not move as quickly as the white ones. The remaining jobs at Chrysler and GM were dangerous, unfair, and paid worse than white ones. Stores would screw over Black customers with worse deals or simply keep you out entirely. You might not be able to get a drink. There was a long tradition of “blind pigs”, illegal speakeasies dating back to Prohibition. Since white bars did not want your business, this is where you had your social life, in the back of abandoned stores or empty offices.

In the Sixties, the clear disparities in social life were well-known and the government was trying its best to understand how to fix it. With the population already declining, Detroit knew there was a problem. The new wave of Great Migration Black workers came to Detroit expecting the middle class life of generations earlier and found they were not wanted. Unfortunately, solutions often made life worse, such as slum clearing for “urban renewal” or building freeways. 12th Street became the new center of Black life, but also the center of the city's crime, with an occupying white police force crushing them. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh was taking steps with Great Society funding to fix the schooling, the crooked credit system in stores, even maybe integrate the police force more. But this was too little, too late for many in Detroit.

And the disturbing part is that these would be remembered as “the good times”.

1967 had a very hot summer too. Temperatures soared into the 80s and 90s every day (which was unusual then, not like now when it’s normal and don’t worry about it). The cops were really cracking down on prostitution, often falsely-accusing women at night and molesting them. These were basically enemy raids and were not well-loved around 12th Street. Rumors were that the police killed a prostitute on July 1st. A few weeks earlier Newark had exploded with four days of rioting for the same social inequalities and divisions. Riots would happen across the country this summer in a very predictable pattern of police violence, angry response. But the worst uprising happened in Detroit.

A man named William Scott ran his own blind pig in the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, a civil rights organization, on weekends. This weekend of the 22nd and 23rd, late Saturday, early Sunday, 85 people were at Scott’s speakeasy celebrating the return of two GIs from the increasingly unpopular and insane-seeming Vietnam War. The cops raided the place at 3:45 AM. They intended to arrest all 85 people, overplaying their hand. A mere ticket might have avoided all of this.

This started a big commotion on the corner of 12th and Clairmount, who saw white police raiding a civil rights structure, or attacking one of their few outlets from the stress of life. One of Scott’s sons was working as a doorman. According to his account he threw a bottle at a policeman and that snapped something. The crowds became unmanageable and the police retreated. As dawn came up, four blocks of Detroit were in full riot.

As Sunday progressed the situation grew out of control. For the people on 12th Street, they instantly felt free of all social control, and certainly out of control of the Police Department. People were just wandering the streets in a manic frenzy, "a carnival atmosphere". Nearby clothing stores were looted and trashed. The cops were being laughed at. Well-armed police sweeps would come by, try to stop some looting, and be totally overwhelmed by thousands of civilians. What were they going to do? Shoot everybody? By the afternoon, a few fires were started. Many more would follow. Some enterprising individuals climbed up to rooftops to snipe at the police. Detroit was at war with itself.

That date, the Tigers played a double header against the Yankees, splitting the games. As the afternoon wore on, both teams had to ignore rising smoke over the left field fence. Left fielder, Willie Horton drove out to try to calm things down on 12th Street, but he was as successful as the police - and also the National Guard, who were pouring into the city at this point. Governor George Romney (father of a certain Mitt, small world) was coordinating with the mayor and they were throwing everything they had at the riot, which just kept spreading.

A lot of the local news reports are up on Youtube right now. WWJ News, a local CBS affiliate had a documentary made I think a week after the riot called "Six Days in July". In it, stunned white reporters recount what they witnessed as they replay their fresh footage. They're comparing the state of the city to London after the German blitz. Some of them have thousand-yard stares like they've just finished a tour of duty on Saipan. More terrifying is just the interviews with people, of all races. Some of them are still nursing gunshot wounds or terrified for their wives who have suffered second degree burns, their neighbors upstairs are dead. This was war, on TV, and they shot it in color film. The story of the Sixties, really.

By Monday, even the Michigan Guard were obviously insufficient. And in fact, some historians argue they were making things worse, being nearly all-white. Looters had pulled as many guns as they could out of stores and were happily firing back. This was both the worst parts of urban warfare and guerilla warfare. You could never know which car might drive by and which might shoot. Which guy walking on the street hadn't just been sniping at you. Tanks were rolling down the streets of America's fifth largest city because infantry needed protection from the high ground shots.

Much of the day was spent in technical legal arguments over sending in full US Army troops. The mayor and governor did not want to declare the city in Insurrection because that would apparently void all the insurance claims in the city at once. Plus, George Romney was eyeing a presidential bid, the family business, and maybe President Johnson felt a way about that. However, all levels of government realized that this problem needed to be stamped out with every tool available. That included famous divisions who had once fought in Normandy. The 82nd Airborne were sent in, along with the 101st. From escorting kids to school in Little Rock to now fighting a rebellion in Detroit, the 101st had seen every side of the Civil Rights Movement.

The paratroopers were racially integrated unlike most of the local gendarmes and that helped quell things. But this riot would take another four days to burn out steam.

There’s countless stories. A little girl was shot and killed in her house, in her room, by a stray bullet. A few Black men were summarily executed in a hotel by police officers. (That's the Katherine Bigalow movie that I do not think is very good.) There's also a lot of good stories. There was a panic that the few stories left open would price gouge their customers, that didn’t happen. There were interfaith, inter-race spontaneous acts of welfare. Black families saved white reporters, or unions gathered aid to whoever needed it. Obviously since Detroit had burned much of itself down, this was the worst of humanity, but in rare occasions it was the best.

In the end 43 people were killed, there were 1,100 injuries, countless arrests. 400 buildings were destroyed, hundreds of families were now homeless, millions of dollars in damage. By that raw data, the 1967 Riots are not the biggest event of civil unrest in American history. But in another perspective, this was the very worst. The NYC Draft Riots might have killed hundreds of people - but NYC survived and in fact thrived. Most of the cities I've discussed just kept growing, and people loved these communities. These events are odd curiosities at worst.

That's not the case for Detroit. It was a lot harder to forget everything that happened when it was on TV, the riots being one of the first signs that the late 60s would be an apocalypse of social upheaval. Shooting at cops just isn’t a constructive means of positive change. This defined the city for decades, which only became more overwhelmed by pornographic images of poverty. The car, Detroit’s source of glory, also killed it. It allowed America to suburbanize and grow increasingly conservative, seeing the cities as a kind of grotesque Bantustand for unwanted racial elements. And what future could people see in a place like this?

Detroit never really recovered from this riot. White flight was already well underway in 1967, and the damn burst after the Uprising. Half the white population of Detroit had left by 1980, things not helped by Stagflation or the oil crisis and then the Crack Epidemic right after that. The city lost a million people by 2020 - that’s barbarians cutting aqueducts numbers. Motor City would not report a population increase again until 2023. When I visited the city as a kid in the 2000s, it felt actively post-apocalyptic. At night, the city was blanketed in darkness because the streetlights had been in disrepair for decades. In 2013, the city declared bankruptcy and it seemed like this place was in terminal decline. The movie RoboCop was a prophecy that came true.

Things are better in Detroit now. Parts of it have rebounded, especially in downtown. Ford restored Michigan Central Station at great expense. Other parts of the city are as ruined as ever. I see a future for a smaller Detroit but one that will never again be the Motor City of the mid-century. That city died in 1967 and rotted for half a century under severe corruption and macroeconomic abandonment. The future will have to be something new. I don’t know if anybody has figured out what that will be yet.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike

WYTS: Indianapolis Colts. Original link here.

I have a ridiculously simple vision for how to fix America: trains, more trains. The Colts play in a sea of parking lots. That should be dense urbanism supported by rail lines. Indianapolis has almost no trains today, just freight and Amtrak. A century ago, there were so many trains, what a paradise, and the city tore itself apart over them. Labor activists did not fuck around back then. This is the 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike!

Streetcars in Indy start getting built in 1864. The first lines were so simple as to be powered by mule, not even steam. By the 20th century the whole system was electrified. Streetcar lines expanded quickly in cities around the world and were prosperous symbols of safe modernity. There’s a lot of money to be made in building a transit network, especially when you can bring customers to exciting new real estate. In addition, Indianapolis was served by a system of "interurbans", a kind of light electric passenger tram that connected 15,000 miles of the country. The interurbans sadly ceased to exist by the time Eisenhower took office. The Indianapolis Traction Terminal, built in 1904, was a mighty monument to rail power, serving 7 million riders a year, 500 trains a day.

This all sounds wonderfully successful. But the problem with railroads is this: it's very profitable to build them, a lot less profitable to maintain them. If you’re say, a capitalist, you can very easily not spend money keeping up infrastructure or hiring enough men, and before you know it, your whole business has gone to shit. This would be the sad story of rail in the 20th century.

Our first signs of trouble begin with labor problems. Streetcar strikes were endemic in this era in dozens of cities, some much worse than the one we're covering today. (31 dead in San Francisco’s strike, in St. Louis they were tossing dynamite around.) The 1913 strike was Indy's second major labor battle in this industry, it was the long-awaited sequel to a strike in the winter of 1892 that ended inconclusively. These strikes were not like the LIRR workers staying home for a long weekend, these actions paralyzed cities. And we’re in the golden age of American socialism, these workers were itching for a fight against the bosses. Sabotage, violence, all kinds of mayhem were common. It’s almost inspirational, but my legal team tells me to advise you not to throw a brick at your boss for everybody's own sake.

Our dramatis personae are the Indianapolis Traction & Terminal Company and the Amalgamated Association of Street & Electric Railway Employees of America. For my own sanity I'll call them "The Company" and "The Union". The Union's VP was John J. Thorpe, and opposing him was Company President Robert Todd. Through the fall of 1912, the Union was gaining more and more members. What made Indy a tempting target for labor organizers was that the Indianapolis Street Railway Company was a union shop, which had been bought by the bigger Indiana Traction Etc. Etc., which was non-union. So in the same city you had union workers living a better life, and non-union guys getting ripped off. Meanwhile, the Company would have preferred that their men work for like 900 hours a week for a half-penny, and also run crews of zero guys per car, if possible, preferably -2 guys.

The Department of Labor offered to mediate the dispute. Todd told them to suck eggs, he was sure there was no labor problem in Indianapolis. Less than half the Company had joined the Union, after all. If there was not a streetcar problem, the Union decided to make one.

On the night of Halloween, the strike began. The whole event had a surreal atmosphere of a grand spooky party, with Union men streaming out of their HQ, Labor Hall, and starting a ruckus. Most of the people on the street seemed to think it was part of the night’s festivities. One clever Union tactic was to drag uninterested guys to the Hall, smack them over the head, and make them sign up while lil birdies flew around their blurry vision. Meanwhile, the Company had been well-prepared for this action. They had spies following Thorpe, had written viscous letters threatening his wife, and imported a lot of scab strikebreakers from Chicago, the dreaded Pinkertons.

The next day, the entire streetcar system in Indy was shut down by protesters and sabotage. The Interurbans seems to have kept running though. People were throwing rocks at cars, throwing bricks at cars, climbing up to cut down the electric lines, I've heard a story that women were just pouring soap on the tracks to destroy traction, which I don’t actually think would work. They were doing whatever they could think of to be maximally annoying, and it seems to have been great fun. The police mobilized to protect "loyal" workers and the repair crews, but actually Indy's police seem to have been on the side of labor here, so they did not get a lot done. Labor solidarity extending to the cops, rare moment in history here.

By the 2nd, the strikebreaker crews had arrived, being well-paid with free room and board so that Company didn't need to pay their regular workers a fair wage. But even they were not all that successful. Every time the scabs managed to launch a streetcar, the mob would rush in, beat the crews up, smash everything with a blunt heavy object, and finally light the car on fire. The cops just watched. Even the mayor, a comedian named Lew Shank (not making that up, he was a Vaudeville guy whose gimmick seems to have been auctioning potatoes - really), did not order a crack down. Election day was coming this week and Shank was a lame duck, so he was happily with the populists here.

Then on the 3rd, Todd tried to retake control of his Terminal Building with an ambivalent police escort as armed guard. He got pelted with so many missiles from the crowd that he had to be rushed to the hospital. He seems to have ended up just fine, not that I can find much info about Mr. Todd, he was not as colorful a character as Mayor Potatoes. The whole city was in a glorious chaos now, John J. Thorpe having proven his point and moreso.

The governor, a progressive reformer named Samuel Ralston, declared martial law. The National Guard were in town by the 5th. The company's headquarters were secured by Gatling Guns (pointing machine guns at crowds happens a lot in these stories). A week after the strike began, the Company had to cave to most demands. The workers got their union, their better pay, and their shorter hours. Some of these gains were lost later as the state came up with their own arbitration: the Company could still hire non-union guys for example. The scabs left town on an Interurban back to Chicago, and the National Guard went home by the 10th. Union leader Thorpe also agreed to leave Indiana and not come back.

Two scabs were killed in the riots, four strikers. Over a hundred injured. And nobody got to work on time for a week.

Meanwhile, Mayor Shank and the police force were in a bit of a bind. 33 officers were threatened with firing for insubordination. Shank resigned a month early in protest and saved their jobs, also saving himself an impeachment. For a moment it looked like the cops would go on strike themselves and start the whole riot over again. (This has happened in other cities.) Mayor Potato Comedian would return to office in the 1920s and unsuccessfully fought the Ku Klux Klan who took over Indiana for a time, but we don't have time for all that today. Governor Ralston, meanwhile, joined with the KKK. He was a successful reformer, but his politics were… complicated. Very Anti-Catholic, turns out.

As we know, all this fighting was a temporary victory, the streetcar system was doomed by history. This was due to decades of deferred maintenance by the Company owners, and the mid-century assumption that streetcars were for the past. This thing called the automobile happened and it was the future. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. If you're a city post-WWII, the federal government was offering you infinite, practically free money to build yourself a highway network, so highways you would build. In 1953, the streetcars were dead, followed by the trolley buses four years later. The Traction Terminal limped on as a bus station for a bit, until it too was torn down. A dismal-looking Hilton stands in its place today.

Since 1957, if you want to get around in Indianapolis, you do it by car or bus. That's it. I actually don’t think your commute times have improved greatly in a century of progress. A very unscientific guess is that it took about a half hour in 1913 to get to work, it’s about a half hour now. Mike Pence was born in 1959, and I'm not saying that streetcars would have stopped that from happening, but we should explore that possibility with more research.

It is illegal to build a light rail in Indiana today. Don’t you even think about it.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Dade Massacre

WYTS: Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Original post here.

(Painting is by Ken Hughes.)  

You ever wonder how Florida became Florida? How American got these scars? Well, let's remember a battle in 1835 known only for a losing commander, the Dade Battle, or Dade Massacre, the opening shots of the Second Seminole War. One of my commenters on Defector asked "do the good guys ever win?". This is one of the rare cases where the answer is "yes".

We need to rewind back to the first Spanish explorers arriving in Florida in 1513. Guys like Ponce de Leon and de Soto did not find gold or the Fountain of Youth, so North America was not terribly interesting to the Empire. However, they did bring Eurasian diseases and most of the pre-contact Floridian cultures were wiped out by the 1700s. In that century, the peninsula was too swampy, too tropical (disease-y), and too depopulated to be very useful for Spanish. Plus, there was the problem of nearby British colonies, soon becoming Americans. Spanish missions were subject to raids from the Carolinas and Georgia, Florida kept flipping between colonial powers as a bargaining chip in the various treaties, and eventually Spanish Florida was down to just a handful of forts as a buffer against the Thirteen Colonies.

Into this vacuum began the creation of a new people. This is "ethnogenesis", where a group of people come together and recognize themselves as something new. This is how your Romans came to be, how your English came to be - nobody comes from a "pure" ethnicity except in racist mythologies. These guys called themselves “yat'siminoli”, which Anglicizes to “Seminoles”, a name meaning “free people”. Its etymology is similar to the Spanish word “cimarrones”, from where we get “maroon”, which in this context, refers to escaped slave communities. The Seminoles were a fusion of Muscogee Creeks moving south, surviving Floridian Natives, and quite a few escaped African slaves, the “Black Seminoles”. They were thriving under light Spanish rule, probably numbering somewhere around 10,000 by the time they came into conflict with the USA.

Also, you may have noticed, that, yes, this is yet another conflict with its routes in slavery. It is almost like the core of all evil in American history is this Peculiar Institution...

By the 1820s, it was hard to see how Spain would keep control of Florida. Most of Spain's great American empire had fallen through a series of fast revolutions. In the 1810s, Americans were raiding Florida to fight the natives. In 1816, a community of slaves in a former British fort in Pensacola had been destroyed by the US navy, the battle of the "Negro Fort". And in 1817, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in the First Seminole War, largely to protect Georgia’s slaves from any temptation to run off and go Seminole. Spain and the US made an agreement, the Adams-Onis Treaty, which traded Florida for all American claims to Texas. Spain gained nothing but the saving of face here, Texas was already lost to the newly independent Mexico... and not for long either, America got it all, baby! Woo, USA!

As far as the Seminoles were concerned, these geopolitical shifts were just part a wider sequence of conquest from the north. We break up the Seminole Wars into three phases, starting with Jackson’s attack. But from the Seminole point of view, this was one continuous battle for freedom from roughly 1811 to the Civil War. The climax being the years around today's events.

In 1823, the US and Seminole chiefs signed the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, with the Native Americans giving up North Florida in exchange for a reservation in the center of Florida to be left alone. The Americans built a series of forts, including Fort Brooke in a spot that would become the city of Tampa fifty years later. One of the Seminoles moving south was a half-British, half-Creek boy born "Billy Powell", who would later take on the Seminole name of “Osceola”. He'll be important.

Obviously the Americans were completely trustworthy and peace lasted forever and our story ends here-

-oh wait, no Andrew Jackson is president in 1829. Oh no, Indian Removal Act of 1830... Jackson is ignoring the Supreme Court on this one... full on ethnic cleansing of most tribal lands west of the Mississippi. The states of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama need more land for plantations, guys, you understand. Even the "Civilized Tribes" have to go. Yeah, they were adopting Christianity and developing their own writing systems, some of them were going so far as to copy the chattel slavery system. Doesn't matter. The poor Cherokee tried so hard to be Southerners. Not to be. On to the Trail of Tears you go.

The Seminoles had a different relationship to slavery and also would not be as easy to dislodge. Florida's lakes and swamps made perfect Guerilla warfare ground. US troops would never get much better at this kind of warfare, as we’d see again in the Philippines and Vietnam, and might see again soon.

By 1835, everybody in Florida knew a big war was coming. But there were still attempts to settle this “peacefully”, as in, buying off the right people. A government agent named Wiley Thompson got a few dozen chiefs to sign on to removal. One of them was Osceola, who gritted his teeth and signed away. For this, Thompson gave him a beautiful silver-plated Spanish rifle, a sign of eternal friendship. Meanwhile, columns of American soldiers were already massing in places like Fort Brooke. Osceola and his allies realized somebody would strike first, might as well be them.

Two big actions begin this war. The first is that Osceola ambushed Wiley Thompson and murdered him with that very same silver rifle. I'm just choosing to believe that bit of folklore because it rules.

The second was the case of an unfortunate column led by Major Francis L. Dade, a veteran of Jackson's Indian Wars. His men were marching north to Ft. King at present-day Ocala on December 28th. Dade would give his name to the battle, though he did not get to fight in it long. He had 103 men, moving through an Un-Floridian-y cold day, with their rifles tucked away in their coats. They were passing through a grove of trees, perhaps whistling a jaunty tune when a shot rang out. Followed by more shots.

You can debate if this counts as a "riot", or a battle. Somebody write me a taxonomy of combat if you want. It was not exactly either because the Americans did not get much of a chance here. From complete surprise, the palmetto trees exploded with well-aimed fire and half the Americans were killed in seconds. Major Dade was one of the first ones gone. Command passed to Captain George W. Gardiner who organized a desperate defense, but his men were surrounded. He would die in the fighting too. Versus 180 Seminoles, the fifty or so surviving and terrified Americans had little hope. They also got little mercy. Only three Americans managed to survive, along with their Native guide. The Seminoles lost only three men.

That set a tone for the Second Seminole War to come, which would be seven years of unglamorous, difficult fighting. This was one of the most bloodiest wars the US ever fought against a Native adversary. About 1,600 Americans died in the fighting with 3,000 Seminole casualties in return. The inevitability of white victory was never much in doubt, even though the Americans lost nearly every set piece battle. Many Seminoles would be dragged off to new homes in Oklahoma. The Black Seminoles fled to places like the Bahamas or Mexico rather returning to slavery.

But at least the Seminoles could live happily in Oklahoma forever- oh Crap Baskets, the American government went back on that promise too and let white settlers take most of it in 1889.

Osceola, who did just miss the Dade Battle but would fight in others, would be led to a truce negotiation in 1837 and then captured in an act of cowardly treachery. He was in bad health from malaria and a tooth abscess, and he died soon after. Major Dade was avenged, I suppose. The warrior's head was cut off by a doctor and kept as a fun curiosity on a shelf for a few decades.

 

Major Dade would get honored with Dade County, now known as "Miami-Dade County", which we featured in the last Florida story. He also got a city named after him, Dade City. A few hundred German Afrika Korps prisoners were kept there during WWII.

You might notice that there was a Third Seminole War. Even though the US government could declare victory, they never did clear Florida of Seminoles. The Natives retreated into the Everglades and kept fighting. Eventually the federal and state governments got exhausted and had to recognize Seminole reservations in Florida. A population of about 4,400 people live on in the state to this day. They also own the Hard Casino chain, including one in Tampa. That's not the most dignified ending but what dignity is there to be had in Florida for anybody?

PS: Really not sure about naming a football team about them. That doesn't smell right to me.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Know-Nothings Riots

WYTS: Baltimore Ravens. Original post here. 

You could have set the movie Gangs of New York in Baltimore. Though you’d have to rename it “Gangs of Baltimore”, and then nobody would have seen it. Pre-Civil War, this city got the nickname “Mob-Town”, which speaking of titles, sounds like a great TV show that I'd watch. (Netflix and I have a lunch date set up to discuss this further.) Baltimore was full of nasty gangs with such colorful names as the Plug Uglies, the Rip Raps, the American Rattlers, the Blood Tubs, the Wampanoags, and my personal favorite, the Butt Enders. Tag Yourself! They wore bowler hats, got extremely drunk, beat people up, and were extremely racist and xenophobic… oh, it kinda all seems less fun when you remember that last bit. I might leave that out of my Netflix pitch. I'll pretend I know nothing about it - Boom! Transition! 1856 Know-Nothings Riots!

To start, we need to go back to the 1840s, which saw a very bad famine across Europe, particularly awful in Ireland. This came with political upheaval, the failed Revolutions of 1848. American cities were seeing huge waves of immigrants, mainly Irish and German. Perhaps as many as 15% of the country was foreign-born by 1860s. Baltimore’s population nearly tripled between by 1860, hitting 212,000, a quarter of them foreigners. These huddle masses were not starving or ignorant. They were well-organized and successful, cannily understanding the political machines of their new cities. That actually made the newcomers all the scarier.

Worse, they were Catholic. Now, as tempting as it is to go all the way back to the Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars to explain why there such a paranoia about tyrannical Popish plots, we’ll just gloss over that, this is long enough already. Not that this kind of vileness requires a rational explanation. We’ll speed up to the part where the Maryland colony was founded specifically as a Catholic refuge. There is a wonderful irony in proud Baltimoreans fighting for a Protestant Maryland in a city named after a Roman Catholic lord.

In 1839, a Catholic convent in B-more was attacked by a mob. Not a promising sign of things to come. Baltimore, like Cincy and NYC, loves to riot.

Then the 1850s are one of the weirder eras in American politics. It did end in a Civil War, after all. I mentioned in the Dallas riot that the party system was in flux and Republicans would win. But before that, it could have gone a lot of other ways. Take Millard Fillmore, whose name reeks of mediocrity. He was already a failed unelected president thanks to Zachary Taylor’s rebellious digestive system killing him and giving us a President Fillmore. Nobody much liked the idea of that, especially his own Whig Party. He started his career as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party (which I also cannot get into right now), so he was not a stranger to crackpot conspiracy theories. Fillmore was rejected by the Whigs for the 1852 nomination, ending his presidency in lame duck obscurity. But in 1856, he had a new home, the Know-Nothing Party, with its obscene official title “the Native American Party”.

“Native” of course, being in the scariest of scare quotes. The "Know-Nothings" nickname came from a loose organization of a few xenophobic secret societies, whose members claimed to “know nothing” when asked. This was not a Socratic method but perhaps it was an admission of their idiocy. Know-Nothingism was an example of those brief waves of militant Protestantism which bubble up into the mainstream of American politics every so often. If we’re lucky, they are defeated quickly and laughed out of the room. If we’re unlucky then…oof.

Also, in a weird quirk, the Know-Nothings were founded by a Jewish man, Lewis Charles Levin. Mass Jewish migration to the US would not be a thing until after the Civil War, and anyway, the party’s imagined enemy was radically conservative Pope Pius IX, not any rabbis. (Meanwhile, the Pope likely had no idea who they were.) Fillmore was the presidential candidate in 1856, an unsuccessful one. Voters knew then not to give failed presidents second chances. He came dead last in a three-way race, and won only one state. Guess which one?

Besides Baltimore, this wave of Nativism saw violence across the US. There were riots in NYC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Washington DC, and of course, Cincinnati - Cincy loves a riot. There were dozens of deaths across the country thanks to these incidents. Many of the Baltimore gangs like the Plug Uglies would travel to other towns and get into fights there.

1856 was going to be particularly rough because Baltimore had two elections, municipal and presidential, one month apart. Elections in this era were great fun, not really about having the most votes but the old sports cliché of “wanting it more”. If you were just walking down the street, you could be grabbed by a gang, say the Butt Enders, thrown into the ballot box, and made to vote for their man. Sometimes you’d be voting all day. Meanwhile the whole city was chaos of Rip Raps shouting in the street punching Democrats. Sometimes voters were given some coins or free drinks. You could get so drunk you’d be found a week later with no memory of how you got there, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s visit to Baltimore in 1849. He died a few days later. Not sure naming a Baltimore team after him is actually honoring the man based on his time in the city...

In 1856, the various gangs did not even wait until election day of October 8th to start shooting. In September a couple guys were murdered as a preamble. But the fighting really started on October 5th. Democrats pulled down a Know-Nothing flag and were fighting all comers. They had a cannon out until the police arrested them. A day later a tavern was sacked, with a fifteen-minute shootout on Holliday Street. On election day itself, twenty wards were hit by violence, with three Democrats killed, two Know-Nothings in return.

A month later for the presidential election of November 4th, the Blood Tubs and the others were far from done. Again, there’s reports of a cannon in town, this time being fired at the police. Apparently, the Maryland Infantry was on standby, but nobody bothered to send them in. By the end of the day, 67 people were injured, 17 people died. When the votes were counted, which were obviously fraudulent and nobody doubted this, Know-Nothing mayoral candidate Thomas Swann had won and Fillmore won Maryland. Fillmore disappeared from politics after his defeat in every other state.

In 1857, Baltimore increased its police force to 397 men, surely enough for a city of hundreds of thousands. Somehow despite this, there were still riots in the 1857 election… and then again in 1858. The Know-Nothings basically disintegrated as a political force by 1860, slavery was so hot-button everybody forgot about the Catholics. Even so, in 1861, the first Union soldier deaths of the Civil War occurred in Baltimore, in yet another riot.

Most of the gangs such as the Plug Uglies simply faded away during the war, as too many angry young men found other places to vent their violence. Decades of municipal reforms helped turn Mob-Town into Charm City, the WASP thugs calmed down. Baltimore was never known for criminal activity ever again, surely.

Nativism would return hard in the 1870s, now targeted against Chinese immigrants. ...But that is a story for another day... Get hype 49ers fans.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

WYTS: Atlanta Falcons. Original post here.

We're in the Deep South now. Guess what the theme of this riot is going to be? 

 

...Oh, how did you ever guess? Yup, it is the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.

On November, 11th 1864, General Sherman ordered Atlanta burnt to the ground during his March to the Sea, making "Georgia Howl". The occupying governments post-war had the opportunity to rebuild the South in vision they could. Their focus was mainly in breaking planter aristocracy power and turning the South industrial and urban. Atlanta, being a railroad hub, became a bastion of manufacturing (including a hot new product called Coca-Cola), middle class power, and city life. This was the "New South", a term coined in the city in 1874.

White supremacy was never really in much doubt by anybody except the most Radical - and correct - of Republicans. But still, Atlanta had a decent level of racial harmony, at least comparatively to the rural areas where sharecropping allowed a new form of slavery to persist for decades. A lot of the new business districts in Atlanta's Five Points had successful Black stores right next to white ones. A "Black elite" of successful bourgeoisie families thought they could earn their way to respectability. Booker T. Washington gave a speech in 1895 in Atlanta basically conceding to segregation, a year before Plessy v. Ferguson. However, he believed economic opportunities could solve the problem long term, even as they were losing power politically.

Washington and his “Atlanta Compromise” would end up looking painfully naive just a decade later. He was a smart man who did a lot for Black people. But there would never be a "live and let live" attitude with Jim Crow.

Reconstruction is marked traditionally as ending with the infamously crooked election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and the retreat of military occupation in the South. However, the full Jim Crow nightmare vision of the South in Jerry Jones’ living memory did not happen overnight. This was a process and it had to be built step by step, violence by violence. Segregation was still expanding into WWI, when President Wilson imposed it on Washington DC. That was relatively peaceful as these things go. In many places, such as Atlanta, Jim Crow was imposed with the death of at least 27 people and days of violence. Thus our story.

It begins with an intense 1906 gubernatorial battle between a moderate racist, Clark Howell, and a full-on piece of shit, Hoke Smith (who I talked about last year as one of the worst Americans in history). They were both newspaper owners, both making their case of different visions of white power as the centerpiece of the election. Howell felt a softer disenfranchisement with poll taxes and whites-only Democratic Party primaries were enough. Smith, backed by a firebrand populist, Thomas E. Watson, wanted more: clear legal impossibilities for Black voters to ever threaten Jim Crow. Watson had been a liberal reformer who even opposed lynching just a decade earlier, in case you're wondering how far and how quickly Georgian politics had shifted. By the autumn, Atlanta was a tinderbox getting hotter and hotter.

In September, a stage production of Thomas Dixon Jr's novel, The Clansman played in Atlanta, further inflaming things. (You might recognize that book title as the inspiration for the "landmark" film, Birth of a Nation, which would inspire the rebirth of the KKK in the 1920s - fun fact.) On Saturday, September 22nd, the Atlanta papers luridly reported sexual assaults of two white women, Ethel Lawrence and her niece, Mabel. It is not clear who did what, just that white pride assumed instantly that the perpetrator was Black. Men were soon roaming the streets ready to attack the first non-white face they saw. We don’t have to use a tinderbox cliché anymore. The correct metaphor now is something hotter, such as Hell.

The Atlanta Riots are one of the better-remembered and documented events, as far as racial pogroms go in the US. We can be reasonably sure of a timeline of events, where they happened, and have most of the names of the dead. It started small with bands of boys spontaneously attacking Black men downtown. These victims were random guys on the street or strangers unlucky enough to be on the wrong streetcar. By nightfall, there were tens of thousands of rioters, looking for any Black business to burn. For example, there was Alonzo Herndon's barber shop on Peachtree Street, which I've heard described as a kind of palace for well-to-do Black men to socialize. This place was a perfect example of Booker T. Washington’s ideal of compromise and Black success in the New South. The barbershop was destroyed, the New South would in fact be much like the Old South.

The riots continued into Sunday, but a lot of the initial energy had been lost after an early morning rainstorm. When the sun rose, the rioters resumed their attack into the Brownsville neighborhood. They were then surprised well-armed and determined resistance by Black men who had not fled the city already. A state militia sent into Atlanta to quiet things down ended up focusing on the Black defenders, getting into a gunfight with them. The fighting ended in a surrender of the victims, the militia rounding up about 250 innocent men. Those Black men were disarmed and arrested, but they were still alive.

By Monday the 24th, the violence was over. We can confirm 25 Black people were dead, 2 whites died in the violence as well. Some cite a number as high as 100 people were killed, but this is not confirmed. As for The Clansman, its next shows in its inter-city tour were either cancelled or secured by a heavy police presence. Black Atlanta largely moved out of the center of town to safer, segregated neighborhoods, notably Sweet Auburn.

Hoke Smith won his election in November and did everything he promised - an honest asshole though, right? A literary test was put into place to nearly completely disenfranchise the Black vote, with a grandfather clause so poor whites were not left out of the Solid South backbone of the Democratic Party. In 1908 Georgia put both measures into the Constitution as full Amendments, intending for this state to be forever linked with white supremacy.

A professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois - you may have heard of him - was so terrified to work in Atlanta he bought himself a shotgun after the riots. He was paranoid for weeks his family would be murdered one night. Du Bois never believed in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise. He wrote a poem called A Litany of Atlanta about the event. “Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked…this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil.” Du Bois would help found the NAACP in 1909.

Another witness to the event was Walter White (not that one), a future head of the NAACP. He was a fair-skinned boy and could have "passed" as white. He did not take that privilege. After witnessing the Atlanta Massacre, he wrote, "After that night I knew I never wanted to be a white man. I knew which side I was on."

The arc of history might eventually bend towards justice, but it would take decades of effort to change its course.