African-American Rights Movements: Race Riots

Republicans and Democrats in North Carolina are locked in a battle over which party inherits the shame of Jim Crow.

The North Carolina government is officially recognizing what historians call the only successful coup d’etat in American history, when white supremacists overthrew the Reconstruction-era government in Wilmington in 1898.

On November 10, 1898, white supremacists backed by the Democratic party murdered dozens of black residents in the streets of Wilmington and overthrew the local Republican government in a coup. It’s known as the Wilmington Race Riot and it helped to usher in Jim Crow laws across the state.

During the Atlanta race riot that occurred September 22-24, 1906, white mobs killed dozens of blacks, wounded scores of others, and inflicted considerable property damage. Local newspaper reports of alleged assaults by black males on white females were the catalyst for the riot, but a number of underlying causes lay behind the outbreak of the mob violence.

On a warm and sultry Saturday, on Sept. 22, 1906, thousands of whites in Atlanta joined together in the downtown area and began attacking and killing blacks in the city. The violence continued for four days. By the official count, 12 blacks and two whites were killed.

On July 27, 1919, an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans.

Almost a century ago, the poet Carl Sandburg, who doubled as a Chicago newsman, searched for the underlying cause of a bloody race riot. In the wake of the current violence in Ferguson, Mo., his essential conclusion is worth reconsidering: The slums take their revenge.

The Tulsa race riots has been inscribed in world history as one of the worst and most violent demonstrations to ever take place. This is a racial history lesson everyone should acquaint themselves with.

Housed in the Oklahoma State Archives, this digital collection features 1, 327 documents and images from various state government agencies, such as the governor's office and the attorney general's office, regarding the investigation into the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The collection includes, for example, eyewitness testimony, letters and telegrams, and police reports.

An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago.

Like the successive rebellion that would erupt 24 years later, the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 was deeply rooted in racism, poor living conditions and unequal access to goods and services.

Even as World War II was transforming Detroit into the Arsenal of Democracy, cultural and social upheavals brought about by the need for workers to man the bustling factories threatened to turn the city into a domestic battleground.

In Detroit a race-fueled riot that lasted for days, left dozens dead and countless others injured. Of the persons killed, 25 were African American and 17 of that group were struck down by police officers.

It was Aug. 11, 1965, that Los Angeles police officer Lee Minikus tried to arrest Marquette Frye for driving drunk in the city’s Watts neighborhood—an event that led to one of the most infamous race riots in American history. By the time the week was over, nearly three dozen people were dead.

This December 1965 CBS News documentary looks back several months to the Watts Riots, tracing the events of August 11-17, 1965, and searching for reasons behind the violence and destruction that resulted in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, over 3,000 arrests, and the participation of over 4,000 California National Guardsmen.

Series of NPR pieces looking back at the Watts Riot.

A police raid on a blind pig, an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling joint, ignited an uprising known as the 1967 Detroit Riot.

Tensions over police brutality had been building in Detroit for years. More than 95 percent of the police force was white and perceived as a “white occupying” force in a city that had suffered from entrenched racism, segregation and lack of jobs.

Social tensions and conflicts [of] today can be traced ... to the divisions that tore apart the nation in 1967.

Collection of podcasts/articles from NPR looking back on the Los Angeles Riots of 1992.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a jury in Ventura County acquitted four LAPD officers of beating Rodney G. King. The incident, caught on amateur videotape, had sparked national debate about police brutality and racial injustice. The verdict stunned Los Angeles, where angry crowds gathered on street corners across the city. The flash point was a single intersection in South L.A., but it was a scene eerily repeated in many parts of the city in the hours that followed.

Here's a look back at seven key moments from the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when Angelenos saw protesters take to the streets in anger over the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial.