Throughout the United States there have been quite a number of riots in just about everywhere. Riots are typically known as noisy violent public discordance to protest against a new government policy or law or against another group. In a society such as America it is quite the norm for populations to take matters into their own hand and riot to stop what they believe is an injustice being done to them. Among the many riots that have occurred in the United States, the New York City Draft riots remains the largest riot to have occurred. It also remains the worst riot to ever occur in the city New York. (Cook 24) The Detroit race riots are significant because it is one of the largest riots experience by Detroit. The largest experienced by the United states in a three decade period following the East St. Louis riots in 1917. The significance of the stonewall riots is largely more obvious than the previous two. The stonewall riots were the first major uprising by the gays and lesbians in the United States. The word stonewall has become synonymous with the start of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement in the United States. (Carter 1) There is an abundance of research done on the New York City draft riots, the Detroit race riots and the stonewall riots, yet to my knowledge there has been no attempt to link those three major and effective civil rights events together.
There were many race riots going on during the 1960’s. But some of the better known are Detroit, Chicago, and New York. They were so destructive, and filled with hatred. One of the most famous is the Detroit riots of 1967 where there was so much hatred and destruction.
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by people who were apart of the LGBT community against the police raid that happened on the morning of July 28,1969, at the Stonewall Inn, located in Manhattan, New York City. It’s believed that Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman, was the first one who rightfully threw the first brick. These events are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the LGBT liberation movement and the current fight for LGBT rights in America.
The riots started at around 3 am on June 28th, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Brooklyn, New York City when police raided the inn, on the pretense of the bar’s lack of a liquor license. They began checking identification and taking people into the bar’s bathroom to determine their sex. The patrons of the bar were held outside as police threw the bar’s unstamped alcohol into patrol wagons. A crowd of Greenwich Village residents and the area’s homeless youth gathered to watch as the bar’s patrons were arrested.
The New York draft riots were about a law that was passed by the government that made any male between ages 20-40 able to be drafted into the army without any choice. They would have to leave their families. So after that the families and them would riot and protest to try to stop the law. Though the law was passed because there wasn’t enough soldiers to fight the war. Though that doesn’t make it right. The Draft law that was passed in 1863 created chaos as shown in the riots paintings of the New York draft riots.
In the summer of 1863 New York experienced one of the most violent protests in the American history. The riots were mainly in reaction to the Union draft for the Civil War, which Abraham Lincoln enacted when volunteers began to run out. The riots lasted for five days, and the mob consisted of almost 50,000 angry men who opposed to the Civil War, draft and Emancipation Proclamation. This paper will discuss how the Irish immigrants in New York affected the draft riots of 1863, and the reason behind their participation, exploring specifically the social, class and racial issues the Irish immigrants faced.
By the outset of 1864, after three years of war, the Union had mobilized its resources for the ongoing struggle on a massive scale. The government had overseen the construction of new railroad lines and for the first time used standardized rail tracks that allowed the North to move men and materials with greater ease. The North’s economy had shifted to a wartime model. The Confederacy also mobilized, perhaps to a greater degree than the Union, its efforts to secure independence and maintain slavery. Yet the Confederacy experienced ever-greater hardships after years of war. Without the population of the North, it faced a shortage of manpower. The lack of industry, compared to the North, undercut the ability to sustain and wage war. Rampant inflation as well as food shortages in the South lowered morale.
The Detroit Riot of 1943 is a riot between the two racial ethnicities- whites and blacks. During the World War 2, this riot is said to be “one of the worst riots” that had happened during those times (blackpast.org/Detroit-race-riot). Black people thought hey were heading to a guaranteed land where they could seek for better future. However, white southerners didn’t want black people to be in their neighborhood; the white people brought their prejudices along with them as they migrate towards the northern side. Because the arrival of newcomers, many suffered from being uncomfortable due to the wartime rationing.
"The Stonewall Riots, 43 Years Later: Reflections of One of the Oldest Surviving Veterans of the Seminal Uprising." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 28 June 2012. Web. 12 Mar. 2016. .
On July 27, 1919, a young African-American man named Eugene Williams unknowingly swam past an invisible line of segregation at a public beach on Lake Michigan. He was then stoned by white bystanders, knocked unconscious and drowned. The death of Eugene Williams set off one of the deadliest and bloodiest riots Chicago has ever seen. I also believe that the labor conflict was another major reason as to why these riots took place. While there were several other factors that contribute to the Chicago race riot, I believe that these particular events are what sparked all the madness.
Stonewall is known as the riot that kickstarted the movement for gay rights in America in 1969. Throughout the 1960’s the gay community was targeted for their homosexual activities because this went against the common beliefs of the people. Most of the population had the Christian belief that being interested in the same sex was against God’s will. This caused discrimination throughout the nation between members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender plus (LGBT+) community and the rest of the country. Due to this discrimination, many LGBT+ members felt like their rights were being violated by the government. On June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, New York City, the community decided to fight back for their rights. They
During the mid-1960s, various racially driven riots descended upon Northern urban centers and blanketed the cities with violence and destruction. Historians have long debated the cause of these riots and whether they were actually riots, or rebellions against America’s prevalent racial polarization in urban areas. Some historians categorize the uprisings as unnecessary riots that stemmed from the increasing black militancy, ghetto residents lack of responsibility for their own difficulty, and a lack of attention towards the needs of whites. However, this claim fails to acknowledge the deep racial divisions across America and the pervasiveness of economic inequality between blacks and whites. The uprisings of the mid-1960s were a insurgence against decades of brutality, humiliation, and unfairness, rather than a riot. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a rebellion as an, “[o]pen or determined defiance of or resistance to any authority, controlling power, or convention.” The uprisings that occurred during the mid-1960s sought to defy the systematic neglect and exclusion towards blacks in a society that whites largely dominated and controlled. The riots that erupted in the mid-1960s were a rebellion against the tribulations blacks endured, specifically police brutality, de facto segregation, and economic inequality and marginalization.
The Watts riots began in the summer of 1965, in a city in Los Angeles called Watts. It all began with the arrest of a young African American by a white California Highway Patrol officer. Now, it was not because he was arrested for already doing something illegal, it was for the way the police officer treated the individual. According to Lacine Holland, an eyewitness to the arrest, the officer “took him and threw him in the car like a bag of laundry and kicked his feet in and slammed the door.” (Flournoy) This caused lots of unrest among the fellow residents of Watts. This was just the beginning of years of pent up oppression for the minorities, which participated in the event. Similarly, in 1992, the Rodney King riots also arose due to the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers for their brutal beating
On July 13, 1863, the streets of New York City were ablaze. People ran rampant without a care of the well being of anyone else; mutilating bodies, robbing people, and setting buildings on fire. Children were rushed to safety from the bloodthirsty mobs. These were the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, and colored and rich people weren't safe from the protests that the poor and working class had against the highly controversial draft (Bernstein 34). These violent riots had to be stopped, and someone had to come up with an idea to put the crowds at rest. The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 were stopped when the Union government decided to compromise by stopping the draft and not receiving more troops for the civil war.
Until the last half of the 20th century, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals were victims of discrimination in American society and in statutory laws, which limited their basic rights. On the night of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, and arrested three drag queens by using excessive force. Bar patrons and spectators, tired of police oppression, stood up and fought back. This was the first major protest based on equal rights for homosexuals. The Stonewall Riots became a turning point for the homosexual community in the United States sparking the beginning of the gay rights movement, and encouraged lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual, or "LGBT," to fight for their rights.
The history of African-Americans in the United States is full of many periods of achievements, as well as periods of struggle. The Los Angeles riots of 1992 were the result of many years of systematic racism in the United States following the Civil Rights Movement. The beating and unjust trial of Rodney King exposed the unfair and brutal treatment of African Americans by the police. As well as the shooting of 15 year-old Latasha Harlins 2 weeks after the beating of Rodney King to further ignite hatred within African-Americans in Los Angeles. What came forth was a week long riot not only changed Los Angeles, but the United States. That is why the Los Angeles riots was the most devastating, yet consequential, civil uproar in the history of the United States.