Mass Racial Violence in The United States - 19th Century Events

19th Century Events

Like lynchings, race riots often had their roots in economic tensions or in white defense of the color line.

In 1887, for example, ten thousand workers at sugar plantations in Louisiana, organized by the Knights of Labor, went on strike for an increase in their pay to $1.25 a day. Most of the workers were black, but some were white, infuriating Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery, who declared that "God Almighty has himself drawn the color line." The militia was called in, but then withdrawn to give free rein to a lynch mob in Thibodaux. The mob killed between 20 and 300 people. A black newspaper described the scene:

" 'Six killed and five wounded' is what the daily papers here say, but from an eye witness to the whole transaction we learn that no less than thirty-five Negroes were killed outright. Lame men and blind women shot; children and hoary-headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down! The Negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected. Those of them not killed took to the woods, a majority of them finding refuge in this city."

These events also targeted individuals, as in the 1891 mob lynching of Joe Coe, a worker in Omaha, Nebraska. Approximately 10,000 white people reportedly swarmed the courthouse when Coe was torn from his jail cell, beaten and lynched. Reportedly 6,000 people visited Coe's corpse during a public exhibition at which pieces of the lynching rope were sold as souvenirs. This was a period when even officially sanctioned executions were regularly conducted in public, such as hangings.