Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
britannica.com
britannica.com
It's the only successful coup to take place on American soil. Wilmington, then a majority-black city, was starting to see black elected officials and prosperous black merchants. The white people wouldn't stand for that, and so planned a coup. A coup that was successful: ~60 deaths; prominent black people and integration-minded whites were ridden out of town on a rail. State and national politicians just let it happened, and over time white people covered it up. It was only leading up to the 100th anniversary that it was even properly acknowledged.
Fresh Air did an excellent interview with the author of a new book on it: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795892582/wilmington-s-lie-au...
I have it on order and am looking forward to reading it.
For decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this sort of ethnic cleansing was common across the US, and it was part of the Nadir's broader pattern of rising white supremacy. Having never heard a peep about this in school, I was skeptical. But Loewen's "Sundown Towns" convinced me with its mix of document-driven, narrative, and data-driven history: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
It's been a valuable reminder to me lately that progress in civil rights is less robust than it seems, and can go into retreat for decades if we let it.
It was a profound and radicalizing experience. Even moreso when you think how few outside of the affected communities ever have that opportunity and indeed are often intentionally driven away from or are indoctrinated against ever experiencing the same.
[1] For example, the Confederate Catechism: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2017/05/29/con...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Another fun fact is that most slaveholding families recovered their wealth less than one generation later through their connections and the white terrorism that let them reclaim their power.
I’d recommend checking out the museum dedicated to these lynching victims in Birmingham, Alabama, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial to Peace and Justice.
Sources: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/04/04/the-sons-...
https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-shows-over-a-c...
I'm not a student of these incidents, but its important just to get a sense of the scale in number of incidents of these race riots. Just two years previously, a particularly bad year in 1919 saw over two dozen(in part known as 'The Red Summer') recorded riots.
And they were everywhere. Just google '<major city> race riot', and you'll probably hit at least one, even for what are now liberal and metropolitan cities.
Then bear in mind, like Tulsa, many of these pogroms and lynchings were the victim of a cover up. The 'law' enforcing whites were often participants. Documents conveniently disappeared, survivors were terrified into silence, and witnessing whites told investigating officials that they just saw nothing that day. Any hard number you find out there is probably conservative because we just don't know.
Not everyone was sending around post cards of the dead and destroyed like in Tulsa, although many certainly did. If you're curious, there is an entire Wikipedia article on "Lynching Postcards". The imagery is disturbing, so you can find it yourself.
Even outside of understanding race relations, this and labor rights suppression (another incredibly undertaught topic) show how 'recent' and fragile the Rule of Law is in this country.
Probably not interesting to history or civil rights buffs though.