When Dissent Becomes Disaster
We all of us cannot help but notice the nasty tone that has reigned at the town hall meetings President Obama and members of congress have organized to explain healthcare. Disrespectful, rude behavior toward elected officials is the least of it—many of the so-called dissenters seem less interested in actually offering an alternative solution to the healthcare problem and more intent on drowning out fellow citizens. Healthy debate is what makes a democracy, but when people show up with guns, and stand with those weapons in close proximity to the President of the United States, one has to wonder: What message are these people trying to send? That they have a right to own them, carry them, display them? At a debate? One has to wonder what the debate is really about, and if those people toting guns really want to debate at all. With that in mind we thought we’d look back at an event in history where a group of angry Americans dispensed with any kind of discussion and went straight to violence as a “solution.” These individuals sought to get what they believed was their country back, too.
In July of 1863 a mob of white males, mostly Irish, rioted through the streets of New York City, torturing and killing African-Americans. This riot had been brewing since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. Northern newspapers made dire predictions, claiming that newly emancipated slaves would flood the north, grabbing jobs and livelihoods away from poor whites. What they failed to mention is that the Proclamation only applied to hostile Confederate states that had seceded from the Union, and where Union troops were already encamped. What the newspapers failed to state is that enslaved blacks had to mostly find their own way to freedom, and that wasn’t easy. What the newspapers failed to say was that slave states that remained loyal to the Union could keep their slaves. The New York media failed to state much, it seems, (and even newspapers that did carry accurate news were ignored for the more sensationalist tales) instead made the decision to focus on narrow reportage, fanning the flames of discontent among poor whites.
What finally set the mob to rioting in New York City on July 13, 1863, was a military draft that had been enacted some months earlier requiring three years of military service of any conscripted man between the ages of 18 and 35. A loophole allowed a man to buy out of the draft with $300 (about $5,200 today) or supply a substitute. The poor and lower middle class, who couldn’t hope to pay such a sum, saw the draft as grossly unfair, particularly since many did not want to fight to free Negroes in the first place.
For two full days the rioters rampaged through midtown Manhattan, burning down buildings and beating and killing blacks, whites they felt were agents of the draft, and any police officers who were there to restore order. A mob of 2,000 even set fire to the Colored Orphans Asylum; the children themselves were saved, fleeing the burning building to the jeers of “Murder the damned monkeys!” as reported in Harper’s Weekly. In the end more than 100 people were killed, including 11 black men who were lynched (they hanged a man and burned his body; they beat another and threw him into the river. They dragged a man through the streets and hung him from a lamppost. They jumped on the chest of a black sailor, stabbed him with a knife and smashed him with stones. And so on) . Many African-Americans were driven from the city, and the black population dropped, according to Leslie Harris’s In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 ”
Well after the Civil War ended, and Reconstruction collapsed with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, African-American communities suffered from a string of racially motivated attacks in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898; Atlanta in 1906, Springfield, Illinois in 1908, East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917, and Chicago a year later. One that has been brought again to the fore was the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Please read on.