American Riots:



American Riots:

Structures, Institutions and History

Michael Jones-Correa

Government Department

Littauer Center/FAS

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

e-mail: correa@fas.harvard.edu

voice: (617) 495-8280

fax: (617) 495-0438

Introduction

In much of the social science literature riots are simultaneously seen as high-profile examples of inter-ethnic tension but also as curiously impotent-- as having little or no effect in the longer run. They are often considered significant only because they dramatically illustrate racial tensions in the United States. I argue, however, that in the right circumstances, ethnic disturbances can have significant long term effects. We see riots cluster around particular time periods-- in particular in the period from 1917 to 1921 and from 1980 to 1993-- when the rules of race relations are in flux. Riots, in turn, help shape new rules of race relations.

Riot outcomes in general have fallen below the radar of political scientists because we tend to focus on the governmental response to the riots, and this response is generally acknowledged to be ineffectual. But the response to riots is often non- governmental, and, because these riots are primarily local events, the initial response is largely local as well. Federal intervention may occur only further downstream. In this view, racial and ethnic re-negotiation takes place first at the local level and then at the national level. The predominant image of government’s role in race relations--formed in the context of the 1960s, when states and localities were laggards being coerced by the federal government’s executive, legislative and judicial branches-- is misleading. This image, in the broader sweep of the 20th century, is the exception rather than the rule. Federal agencies rarely create any program ex nihilo -- they scavenge among state and local programs for examples of what they want, incorporating local initiatives into federal agendas. Federal intervention is critical-- but largely because it reinforces certain local alternatives at the expense of others.

This paper demonstrates two things: that at certain historical moments like those of 1917-1921, inter-racial disturbances in the United States shared common structural conditions (and are profitably analyzed as part of a common social process), and second, that these riots were ‘critical junctures’-- not because of the events themselves, but because they accelerated institutional shifts, ushering in an era of racial containment. I’ll close by briefly indicating some parallels and differences with contemporary inter-ethnic disturbances.

Civil Disturbances 1917-1921

Between 1917 and 1921 there were nine major urban civil disturbances in the United States, punctuating the background hum of more localized events--the lynchings, firebombings and assaults--that were the basic vocabulary of inter-racial violence at the time.[1] It should be understood that the outbreaks of these anti-black riots were symptomatic of rising racism in both North and South. Unlike much of the violence of the late 19th century, which was directed at immigrants as well as blacks, by the early 20th century, violence was primarily targeted at African-Americans. Some scholars have suggested that anti-immigrant sentiment in this period waned as immigrants made the transition from ‘other’ to ‘white,’ and moreover, that a part of ‘becoming white’ was taking part in violence against black Americans.[2]

Table 1

List of Cases

East St. Louis, Illinois July 2, 1917

Houston, Texas August 23, 1917

Charleston, South Carolina May 10, 1919

Washington, D.C. July 19, 1919

Chicago, Illinois July 27, 1919

Knoxville, TN August 30, 1919

Omaha, Nebraska September 28, 1919

Elaine, Arkansas October 1, 1919

Tulsa, Oklahoma May 30, 1921

These disturbances have not exactly been forgotten, but not much has been made of them either. They are recounted as part of the broader story of white racism and recalcitrance against blacks in the United States, but not as being particularly significant in and of themselves. When these riots have been remembered, it has usually been as a string of case studies, each illustrating a unique confluence of events, albeit resulting in similar anti-black violence. This is somewhat understandable. Apart from their timing, the nine civil disturbances between 1917 and 1921 seem, on the face of it, to have little in common. They are widely dispersed geographically, some in the midwest, some in the west, the south or border states. The historical accounts have gravitated toward the particularities of the immediate events surrounding the disturbances. For example, Williams and Willliams, who chronicle several of the disturbances (Knoxville, Elaine AK, Tulsa and Chicago) in their Anatomy of Four Race Riots (1972), proceed to dissect these in minute hour-by-hour detail, without providing any real explanation of why these riots took place when and where they did. Elsewhere, we learn, for instance, that the riot in Elaine began over a share-cropping dispute, that Tulsa’s began with a gathering outside the courthouse following arrest of an alleged black rapist, that Chicago’s 1919 riot began after the drowning of a black boy at an all-white beach on Lake Michigan. D.C.’s riot began after the newspapers began printing lurid stories on black crime, and Atlanta’s followed clashes by white sailors and demobilized black soldiers on leave (Shapiro 1988).

It’s not that these histories aren’t interesting. These were, after all, some of the bloodiest riots in American history-- 38 people died in the Chicago riots alone (23 blacks and 15 whites) and more than 500 persons were injured. Though the riots usually began with whites targeting blacks; blacks were hardly passive victims; there were a considerable number of deaths among whites as well, as blacks mobilized in self-defense. Both blacks and whites used rifles, pistols, knives, and firebombs. Both groups tested new technologies in these riots; automobiles were used, for instance, in Washington D.C and Chicago to drive up and down streets while their occupants fired at bystanders. In Tulsa, there were rumors of airplanes being used to track the movement of blacks, and even to hurl down bombs. There were a lot of rumors in general: of women and children murdered; of black rapes and white looting, of rings of black gun-smugglers in East St. Louis and of Mexicans assisting blacks in the manufacture of bombs in Chicago (Commission 1968: 21); and of all kinds of secret plots and conspiracies against both whites and blacks. This all took place against a backdrop of political corruption and police incompetence; of racist unions, and a sensationalist press.

The stories of these riots make for vivid reading, but what is strikingly absent, from a social scientists’ point of view, is any attempt to draw comparisons among these cities, or to similar cities that did not experience racial disturbances. The causes of each event are seen as essentially non-replicable-- though the results are acknowledged as playing a part in the tapestry of unequal race relations being woven in the United States. The best accounts of the period--many of them written about Chicago’s 1919 race riot-- do point out structural factors underlying the disturbances. The Chicago Commission on Race Relation’s report The Negro in Chicago , published only three years after the riot, gathered extensive demographic, economic and fieldwork data to make the argument that the riots had three main causes: the migration of blacks from the South, the problem of housing for blacks in Chicago, and tense relations at work (Chicago Commission 1968). This explanatory framework has been borrowed by historians to explain the underpinnings of race relations not only in Chicago but in other cities of the time. Accounts of Chicago (Spear 1969, Tuttle 1972, and Hirsch 1983), Detroit (Sugrue 1996), Cleveland (Kusmer 1976) and Springfield, IL (Senechal 1990) have all borrowed from and elaborated on the suggestions of the Chicago Commission’s report. But while there have been a number of excellent case histories, historians have not attempted a comparative analysis of riot antecedents. It isn’t clear, therefore, whether the structural preconditions apply across riot cities, or really distinguish them from non-riot cities.

There has been only one quantitative effort at analyzing possible commonalities among the riots of the period: Lieberson and Silverman’s 1965 study of paired cases of riot and non-riot cities from 1913 to 1963. The study has the advantage of looking at both riot and non-riot cities across a wider pool of cities, but is limited by its methodology, which relies on a simple comparison across cases.[3] They concluded that nothing in particular distinguished riot from non-riot cities. Why haven’t more of these studies been done? Part of the answer has to do with the long shadow of urban riots in the 1960s. A lengthy list of authors tried and failed to come up with any meaningful quantitative comparisons of underlying factors to the riots of the time.[4] Their negative findings cast a pall on the use of quantitative tools to explore riots more generally. But the other part of the answer has to do simply with the difficulty of getting adequate data to test any hypotheses.

***

The data presented here were originally collected by Steven Ruggles and his collaborators at the University of Minnesota in 1997 as part of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series or IPUMS. IPUMS is a database of census data from 1850 to the present (Ruggles and Sobek 1997). The data is a random sampling of census records, not the complete census, but it’s the only machine-readable collection of census material that is coded to allow comparison across years. For the 1910 census, for instance, the project took a sample of one in every two hundred and fifty records. That doesn’t sound like much, but realize that even for the subsample of cities over 25,000 which I focused on, there were still about 113,000 individual records.[5] For 1920, which had a random sample of one in every two hundred individuals, there were almost 173,000 records.[6]

These individual records hold person and household data, including information on race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, (and for immigrants, year of arrival and proficiency in English), city of residence, home ownership, occupation, education levels and literacy. By aggregating these data to the city level, we can see if there is something particular about the socio-economic conditions of cities that might have led to a riot outcome. These data, then, allow us to take another look at the hypotheses generated by historians and sociologists regarding the structural conditions underlying inter-racial disturbances.

***

Basically the data can be used to confirm whether the historical accounts of the urban disturbances-- as being sparked by contestation over housing, jobs and public space between whites and recent black migrants from the South--are correct. Three hypotheses can be tested separately:

The first is whether it these riots were related to demographic shifts, and in particular, the urbanization of Southern blacks, who were moving in increasing numbers into cities across the South, North and Mid-West. Black migration from the South to the North and West had been increasing steadily since the 1880s, but the Great Migration really began after 1910. The migration figures tend to be a little sketchy, but between 1910 and 1920 about 500,000 or more blacks moved out of the South, with most of the migration occurring after 1916 (thirteen southern states had an absolute loss of black population).[7] The reasons for the migration are various: the devastation of the cotton crop in the South and resulting tensions within the sharecropping system certainly contributed, as did the increase in black lynchings. The outbreak of war in Europe, added to the effects of anti-immigrant legislation, meant the regular Northern labor supply was cut off (Chicago Commission 1968: 79). After the U.S. entered the First World War, an additional one million men were taken out of the labor force (Johnson and Campbell 1981: 71). A wartime economy meant a tremendous demand for labor, and for blacks, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.[8] Employers who never would have considered blacks for semi-skilled manufacturing jobs before then began not only hiring but actively recruiting black migrants. Within a very short period of time African-American populations in Northern and Midwestern cities doubled, tripled and quadrupled.[9]

The second hypothesis is that labor competition was increasing between blacks and whites in this period, since blacks were moving increasingly into both skilled and unskilled positions previously occupied only by whites. This period was characterized by increasingly bitter accusations that blacks were being recruited by Northern employers as strikebreakers. In East St. Louis, after strikes in 1916 at meat-packing plants and in 1917 at the Aluminum Ore Company, there was considerable resentment on the part of white workers about the hiring of non-unionized blacks (Rudwick 1964: 18, 27; Chicago Commission 1968: 74).[10] In the Chicago Stockyards strike of 1904 and the teamsters strike of 1905 employers used nonunion black workers as strikebreakers (Trotter 1993: 63; Spear 1969:36). [11] The fact that white immigrants also occasionally played the role of scabs and that blacks were discouraged from joining predominantly white unions was conveniently overlooked (Chicago Commission 1968 [1922]: 419-420; Kusmer 1976: 67).[12] Susan Olzak uses time-series and event-history analysis in her study of ethnic competition and conflict between 1877 and 1914 to reach similar conclusions. Collecting information on inter-ethnic conflict across 77 cities, she found, in particular, that as occupational segregation decreased and union formation accelerated, inter-ethnic conflict increased. Increasing contact and competition in the workplace, she argued, leads to overt conflict (Olzak 1992).

The third hypothesis is that there was competition over housing and public space.[13] Residents of middle and upper class neighborhoods, who had the resources to move further out to the city’s edge or beyond, tended to give way in the face of black middle class incursions, while working class whites, who were irrevocably tied to their investments in their homes, were more likely to stay and resist, if at all possible. In Cleveland, for example, historian Kenneth Kusmer describes how the areas of black settlement were bounded in some areas by native born settlements, in other areas by neighborhoods of Russian Jews, and elsewhere by other Central European immigrants. As African Americans sought housing, native-born whites in adjacent neighborhoods moved readily to outlying areas. Russian Jews, who were largely renters, moved relatively quickly as well. It was the second-generation immigrant neighborhoods, with fewer resources than the native born but higher rates of home ownership than Russian Jews, which held fast and at times violently resisted black migration into their neighborhoods (Kusmer 1976: 170-171). Immigrants in these neighborhoods, “[h]aving raised themselves above poverty, acquired a small home (with perhaps a large mortgage as well) and attained a modest level of income.... were fearful of association with any group bearing the stigma of low status” (Kusmer 1976: 171). There were similar processes at work in other cities: In Chicago’s 1919 race riot, historian Dominic Pacyga points out that more blacks were killed in Irish neighborhoods to the east of the ‘black belt’, where middle-class African Americans were competing for housing, than to the west, where blacks crossed Polish and Italian neighborhoods on the way to work in the meat-packing district (Pacyga 1997). As black neighbors moved in, threatening to devalue the real-estate investments of the Irish lower-middle class, the goal became the removal of African-Americans from the neighborhood (Pacyga 1997: 205; see also Grossman 1989: 175).

***

To test these hypotheses the 1910 and 1920 individual records are aggregated to the city level, so that instead of 113,000 cases for 1910 there are 230 cases for cities having over 25,000 in population; the individual cases are likewise aggregated 1920 data. Merging the 1910 and 1920 data (dropping those cities that appear in one sample but not the other) there is a final count of 171 cases-- cities with a population over 25,000 present in both 1910 and 1920. Out of these 171 cities, six had civil disturbances in this period--East St. Louis, Houston, Omaha, Chicago, Knoxville and Washington D.C. (three other cases--Charleston, Tulsa, and Elaine, Arkansas--were dropped for lack of data). The independent variables include measures of migration, labor force participation and home ownership by race and immigrant status; the dependent variable simply indicates a ‘riot/ ‘no riot’ outcome. I then use a multivariate logistical regression analysis to test which variables contribute to an outcome of ‘riot.’

Measures of cities’ population, black population, and foreign-born population in 1910 are all used as controls. The population change hypothesis is tested by measures of change in city population, change in black population, and change in foreign-born population over the decade 1910-1920. I expected the greater the change in a city’s population, the greater the chance of race riot. The labor competition hypothesis is tested by change in numbers of blacks and whites holding jobs in three occupational categories, “skilled labor,” “service jobs,” and “unskilled labor.” I expected the greater the change in these occupational categories, the greater the chance of riot. Finally, with housing competition, I expected that as ownership increased, so would the chance of riot.

Table 2:

Logistical Regression Effects of Population Change, Labor Composition,

and Housing Ownership on Race Riots in Chicago 1910-1920

B SE

Constant -9.7995 ** 4.1210

Population Change

City Population 1910 -.000047 * .0000256

Black Population 1910 .0001 .0000753

Foreign-Born Population 1910 .0000874 .0000561

Change in City Population 1910-20 .0001 * .0000788

Change in Black Population 1910-20 -.0006 .0005

Change in Foreign-Born Population 1910-20 -.0001 .0001

Labor Composition

Change in Black Unskilled Labor .0002 .0009

Change in Blacks in Service Jobs .0027 .0019

Change in Black Skilled Labor .0066 * .0039

Change in White Unskilled Labor -.0004 .0003

Change in Whites in Service Jobs .0006 .0006

Change in White Skilled Labor -.0012 * .0006

Housing Ownership

Change in Black Ownership .0002 .0003

Change in White Ownership .0002 * .0000947

N=171

* p ................
................

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