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Photograph by Bettmann Archive, Getty Images Right: During the riot, whites set fire to scores of African American homes, leaving more than a thousand people homeless. In most of these massacres and riots, the police turned a blind eye to white violence and instead arrested African Americans for defending themselves. In 1921, white mobs, with the complicity of local police, torched Tulsa, Oklahoma’s black business district, known as “Black Wall Street,” killing about 300 people and leaving nearly all of the city’s black population homeless. During this first wave, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were moving north in what came to be known as the Great Migration, seeking jobs created by wartime spending and fleeing the violence and oppression in the former Confederacy. That year, dozens of violent racial clashes played out with ferocity in at least 25 places including small towns such as Elaine, Arkansas, and Bisbee, Arizona, and in big cities, including Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. The first wave came in the early 20th century, culminating in the so-called Red Summer of 1919, when the country was recovering from World War I, bitterly divided by racial and gender tensions and anti-immigration fervor, and ravaged by the deadly Spanish flu epidemic. Right: More than 50 years later, protesters take to the streets of New York with raised fists, signs, and cell phones to speak out against the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Starting in 1919, three major waves of nationwide uprisings in the 20th century shed light on how the fight for racial equality has grown, how it’s changed, and what has stayed the same. But the roots of 2020’s events go far deeper into the last hundred years of American history, which were punctuated by race riots, massacres, and clashes between the police and African Americans. A disproportionate number of the people killed, like Floyd, are African American.Ĭasting their eyes to the past, observers search for comparisons to today’s uprisings in the chaos of 1968. Floyd was one of approximately 1,100 people killed annually by police use of force in the United States in recent years, according to data compiled by Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit that tracks police-involved deaths since 2000. Over the last two weeks, more than a thousand protests-most of them peaceful, though some devolved into violence-have swept across America caused by outrage over the death of George Floyd, recorded as a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down.
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Rap Brown once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” The 1960s Black Power activist formerly known as H.