“Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites”

This chapter, which covers the first three decades of the twentieth century, begins with an account of the life and career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the most influential Black intellectual and social scientist of that period. A classic insider/outsider in American society, Du Bois earned a Harvard PhD in sociology and wrote a pioneering study of systemic racism in The Philadelphia Negro. He was also an outspoken activist in the Socialist Party and NAACP. Du Bois’s work placed him at the forefront of struggles against racism, especially in northern cities into which 1.5 million southern Blacks moved in the Great Migration, lured by the prospect of steady, well-paid factory jobs. These Black migrants, however, were outnumbered two to one by southern White migrants to those cities, who forced Blacks into ghettos with rundown, overcrowded housing and inferior schools. Tensions between the races intensified after World War I, sparking the “Red Summer” of 1919, with major race riots—instigated by Whites—in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, leaving dozens dead and thousand with burned-out homes. The bloodshed culminated that fall with the massacre of some two hundred Black tenant farmers and their families in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, followed two years later by another massacre, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The decade of the 1920s offered northern Blacks little respite from the racism that kept them from escaping poverty.

A Quiet Rage Explodes

This chapter traces the eruption of the Black community in response to police brutality, noting July 24, 1964 as one of the era's very first “race riots” that occurred in Rochester. It discusses how a response to police brutality ended as an indictment of the economic conditions in Rochester's ghettoes. It also argues that the three-day rebellion, which ended with the calling up of the National Guard, became a watershed moment in the city of Rochester. The chapter describes the impressive degree of precision that those men and women, youth and senior citizens demonstrated in the rebellion when they attacked the police and private property with vengeance, but exempted community institutions and stores with a reputation for fairness. It investigates the 1964 uprising that seared Black Rochester into the nation's conscience, noting the uprising as the beginning of a series of Black rebellions that rocked the nation's urban centers in the 1960s.

‘Race’ and Resistance to Policing Before the ‘Windrush Years’: The Colonial Defence Committee and the Liverpool ‘Race Riots’ of 1948

Between 31 July and 2 August 1948, Liverpool experienced three nights of racial violence on a scale not witnessed since the end of the First World War. Despite being initiated by white rioters, the so-called ‘race riots’ of 1948 were more significant in terms of the relationship between the police and Liverpool’s black population. Previous studies have sought to understand why and what happened during the riots; however, there has been little analysis of the aftermath. This article looks specifically at how black people responded to the ‘race riots’ in 1948 and argues that this episode led to a period of heightened political activity at a local and national level centred around the issue of policing. It focusses on the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC) that was formed immediately after the riots to organize the legal defence of individuals believed to have been wrongfully arrested. In its structure and organizational methods, the CDC represented a prototype of the defence committees that became a hallmark of black political opposition to policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Examining the aftermath of the Liverpool ‘race riots’ in 1948, thus, offers new perspectives on the historical development of black political resistance to policing in twentieth-century Britain. On the one hand, it reveals a longer history of struggle against racially discriminatory policing, which predates the ‘Windrush years’ migration of the 1950s and early 1960s. It also highlights the historical continuities in the way that black resistance to policing manifested itself over the twentieth century.

The Language of the Unheard: Legal Services and the 1960s Race Riots

This article uses newly collected data on communities who received legal services grants between 1965 and 1975 to evaluate the effectiveness of the federal antirioting program. Results indicate a 4.8% reduction in the number of riots and a 4.7% reduction in the duration of riots due to legal services programs. Additional analysis identifies a positive relationship between riot propensity and legal services funding. Therefore, the estimates provide a lower bound for the possible causal relationship between the legal service program and riot propensities. Further analysis reveals communities implementing legal services programs earlier report better community–police relations in 1970. Together these results are consistent with the historical narrative that legal service lawyers’ involvement in community empowerment and advocacy mitigated the damage of riots that occurred in the 1960s.

Race and Violence

White-supremacist violence; theft of land and resources; the genocide of indigenous peoples and the horrors of violence of stolen and enslaved human beings to build wealth for their colonial overlords, countries, and empires in the United States, the Caribbean, and the Americas; and xenophobic and racialized exploitations of labor produced by people of color are core aspects of US history. The issues, spectacles, histories, and lived experiences of race, racism, and racial, gender, and sexual violence drive the structural oppression of nonwhite communities in the United States and have unique trajectories while also developing unevenly and relationally within shared histories of racial, gender, and sexual violence and economic exploitation. Violence toward people of color started with first contact between European colonizing forces and indigenous communities in the late 15th century. From the late 15th century to the 21st century, the spectacles of lynching; vigilantism; Jim Crow / Juan Crow segregation practices; the imposition of boarding schools and the documented physical, psychological, and sexual violence inflicted on indigenous children; and the extreme anti-Chinese violence of vigilante race riots and xenophobic immigration laws are all legacies continuing into the 2020s. In the 20th century, a range of organized systems and acts of violence continued and emerged, from white-supremacist and patriarchal authority on communities of color; race riots; lynching; massacres; and unlawful imprisonments to the 1943 zoot suit riots, deportation, other acts of state-driven violence, and the rise of mass incarceration. Acts of domestic terrorism by white-supremacist individuals who see Latinx, Muslims, Jews, and other non-Anglo-Saxon communities as threats and invaders to the US body politic are a central feature of the 21st century. Along with vigilante violence toward communities of color, police brutality and deadly force with impunity continue to traumatize communities of color and foments the racial biopower politics of the 21st century, not to mention the ongoing crisis of domestic and gender-driven violence. This article summarizes a range of sources that speak both to empire- and state-driven and vigilante violence in different time frames toward varying communities in the United States and beyond.

An Unknown Negro Girl without Title or Prestige, 1940–1946

This chapter explores Pauli Murray’s continuing civil rights activism, emerging feminism, and legal training during World War II. Murray joined the Workers Defense League and campaigned to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution. The experience partially inspired Murray to become a lawyer. While studying at Howard University, Murray became conscious of sexism, which she labelled “Jane Crow.” Murray’s mental health, sexual identity, and gender identity all continued to trouble her. She initiated restaurant sit-ins to protest segregation in Washington and reported on the 1943 Harlem race riots for a socialist newspaper. Murray also completed a master’s degree at Berkeley before becoming the first African American Deputy Attorney General of California.