RIOTS, URBAN
RIOTS, URBAN. Urban rioting in America antedates the Revolution and has been a part of the experience of American cities ever since. This is so because, from its inception, American politics always considered rioting—or, to use the older political terms, "crowd action" or "politics-out-of-doors"—to be a normal, if extreme, extension of the American political process. So race riots, ethnic upheavals, and economic conflagrations, or any
combination of these, have been part of the urban political landscape.
Even before the Revolution, New York City was afflicted by a major race riot, one in which at least a score of African American slaves and freedmen were killed or executed. The American nation was born of revolution, so it was that rioting marked the ultimate response to the Stamp Act of 1765 in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. Sporadic violence occurred in urbanizing America for the next half-century, and as cities matured in the Age of Jackson, cities exploded in violence. In 1834, called by the notable American diarist Philip Hone "the Great Riot Year," rioting from a variety of causes moved American politics to its most violent margins. There were anti-abolitionist riots in every major eastern and Midwestern American city, pitting immigrant Irish Catholics against native upper middle-class Protestants. Ethnic and racial riots (more than fifty in cities) persisted until 1835, when such "politics-out-of-doors" (a contemporary phrase) temporarily subsided. The anti-Draft Riot of 1863—the bloodiest in American history, with perhaps as many as two thousand dead—seemed to mark the end of the Age of Jackson.
After the Civil War, riots pitting labor against a developing and onerous factory system occurred with increasing frequency; for example, in 1877 and 1892, worker strikes in Pittsburgh turned violent. The cause of two riots during the Great Depression may also be traced to economic conditions. The violent repression of the Bonus Marchers in Washington D.C. (1931) and the United Auto Workers Sit down Strike in Detroit (1936) also indicate a remarkable continuity with America's urban past.
Post-World War II American riots also demonstrated that continuity. Racial and class-related strife was evident in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. The Weather-men's "Days of Rage" widespread racial violence in the Watts section of Los Angeles (1965), Newark, Detroit, New York City, and elsewhere (1967) all indicated the persistence of urban problems yet to be solved. In the more recent past, a bloody reprise occurred in Los Angeles in 1992, and a major race riot took place in Cincinnati in 2000.
