Postracial Justice and the Trope of the “Race Riot”

This chapter examines the trope of “race riot” as a rhetorical strategy in news media that disciplines race-conscious protest. Adopting a rhetorical genealogy inspired by Michel Foucault, the analysis reads together the news reports about the 1906 riots in Atlanta, Georgia and the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. The century dividing these two events may seem too distant, but is necessary in order to identify the legacies of state-sponsored white supremacy that continue to shape expressions of “justice” in the United States. Although white supremacy is generally understood as no longer relevant, racial violence against people of color remains legitimate while exercised by those enforcing law and order. Attention on two racial-antagonistic events divided by a century can assist in highlighting the discursive legacies of state-sponsored white supremacy. The chapter concludes with contemplation on postracial justice, or the expression of justice that is assumed to be beyond the influence of race.

Negro Distrust of the Police Increased

The first chapter opens with scenes from Chicago’s Red Summer race riot in July of 1919. It explores the cascade of white violence that characterized the riot, as well as the armed self-defense that Blacks deployed in response. It also tracks the ways in which both police brutality and police neglect were features of how Black Chicagoans experienced the Chicago Police Department during those awful summer days in which thirty-eight Chicagoans in total were killed. From there, it shifts in the 1920s, when segregation in Chicago became more rigid, and explores how police corruption and political corruption worked hand in hand to shape the city’s Prohibition decade. It documents how politicians especially used the police department to their advantage, in particular by variously allowing vice operators to set up shop in less politically influential Black neighborhoods, and subsequently cracking down on low-level vice offenses by Black people. It also explores the long reach of police torture of civilians in 1920s Chicago.

Occupied Territory

In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city’s political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago’s Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.

DH and the American Literature Canon in Pedagogical Practice

In this chapter, Amy Earhart shows how the connection between digital humanities and American literature is intimately linked to the historical development of activist DIY digital projects built by scholars to provide alternatives to a predominantly white, Eurocentric canon. Earhart’s students construct a digital archive that puts Texas’s 1868 Millican race “riot” in broader cultural context by using historical newspaper articles about lynchings and editorials about voter rights. As students curate materials related to the Millican “riot,” they help to revive a period in African American literature and history that is being recovered by scholars as a period of resistance. Earhart’s essay shows how structural hierarchies, in the biases of historical newspapers and in the technologies we employ today, can limit access to the literary voices that once animated the period.