Fires Never Go Out of Style: A History of Riots in America

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Newark Riots. Rumors of the police beating a black cab driver during his arrest was the spark for city-wide rioting. Even though the rumor later proved to be false, the long marginalized, abused, and impoverished black community didn’t need much provocation to strike back at the mostly white police force. 

For five days, Newark’s rioters and police clashed while bystanders and emergency services found themselves caught in the crossfire. The New York Times has an illuminating retrospective on the riots and its legacy to Newark. Many consider the riots to be the final nail in the coffin for Newark and it’s only just now starting to come back. Others believe that despite the violence and damage (or perhaps because of it) at least the black community finally got a voice in the city. Perhaps both or neither or true. But I thought this would be a good time to review the riots in American history: when and why they occurred and what the trends were.

Riots are in effect volcanic reactions from a society, or a sizable segment of it, against authority for their conduct, obstinacy, or negligence to immediate issues affecting that society. While protests, violent or peaceful, are generally organized enough to stand for or against a given issue with specific demands, riots are chaotic and fervent; it’s like a wound-up rubber band snapping loose right on your face. Even if the root causes of a riot are unclear at times, the more-often-than-not single event that sparks the riot usually prove to be a major indicator of the perceived wrongs that authority has inflicted on that society.

The major trend in riots for over fifty years right to the present has been due to racism, through different avenues. For many the recent riots in Ferguson and Baltimore come to mind, in response to claims of police misconduct and brutality that led to the deaths of young black men. This is not unlike the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 when the police beating of Rodney King was captured on camera and the officers were acquitted. The same issue was present for the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles and Newark’s. 

However, for each riot the root cause was not just police brutality. Regardless of your politics, it’s clear that both then and now most black (and brown) people in inner-city areas simply do not have the same opportunities as even other black and brown people do elsewhere, let alone white people. The fact that race riots have been occurring sporadically for over fifty years show how little progress has been made in many areas pertaining to race.

However, America hasn’t been subject to just race riots. While European riots (along with much of Europe in general) are known for their black-bloc, Molotov cocktail-throwing masked protesters/rioters, America has had its fair share of similar political and economic riots. They’re actually the inspiration for some of the best Rage Against the Machine songs. Though it may surprise you, there's a long history of labor movements peppered with socialism and anarchism in American history, and some of those strikes devolved into riots. 

One notable example are the riots that broke out during the large-scale Railroad Strike of 1877, leading to widespread chaos across industrial centers in America between workers and state militia and federal troops. Much of this tradition continued well into the twentieth century when labor became more organized and progress was deemed too slow. In an era when organized labor's power is all but eradicated, these stories can be especially surprising. Nowadays, it's arguable that Antifa is trying to pick up the slack.

Then of course there’s class riots, and that arguably has been the main trend in riots for all of American history. Even if it seems to be buried under race and politics, believe me, if most of these rioters had a better standard of living, they would have stayed home. Even before our nation was officially founded, there are documented cases of workers and farmers revolting against their bosses or landlords up and down the East Coast. The most prominent of these types of riots was the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, which remain the deadliest riots in American history. This was in response to the draft that Congress initiated to replace massive Union losses in the Civil War. While it was at its core an initiative to stimulate volunteering, it was clumsily executed and enraged much of New York City’s population, which proved to be a cocktail of destruction: much of its industry was cotton based and connected to the South so they opposed the Civil War, and much of its workers were poor Irish immigrants who did not want to compete with black people for low-wage jobs, or rabid Nativists who didn’t want to compete with either of them. When a fire company’s chief was drafted, the firemen destroyed the local draft office and kicked off a city-wide revolt. For five days the city burned and both black people and Republicans were targeted by the rioters. It was finally put down with Federal troops fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg. 105 people were killed—eleven black people, eight soldiers, two policemen, and the rest rioters. Other than the Civil War itself, the riots remain the single-largest insurrection in American history.

And these are just events that can be solely classified as riots. They don’t account for the overwhelming amount of (mostly) peaceful protests (Vietnam, WWI) or the outright rebellions that occurred (Shays’ Rebellion, Southern secession). Along with riots, these reactions to authority show that American history is not a straight and clean line. It has many twists, turns, stutters, and splinters, but also progress. Whether a reaction is a protest, riot, or rebellion, if any of these events occur, authority is forced to take notice if they don't want their cities to burn.