In other words, a riot is often a symptom of a larger, underlying problem—not the problem itself. When protests broke out across the United States in the spring of , news outlets showed individuals breaking into retail stores and stealing items, lighting police cars on fire, and breaking glass. Why were buildings attacked and statues destroyed? The answer is more complicated than it seems. Martin Luther King Jr. Riots have been around since before the American Revolution. When their pleas were ignored, they rioted.
When institutionalized racism and socioeconomic disparities persist for years and years, making certain American populations more vulnerable than others, collective frustration is bound to erupt in demand for change. Consider the civil rights movement. Grassroots efforts were enacted to end racial discrimination and segregation and obtain equal rights for Black Americans.
Still, many of the marches, sit-ins, and Freedom Rides were met with criticism, hatred, and violence from opposing parties, including many members in authority roles. America has evolved, and policies have changed, but riots have persisted, and for good reason.
Oppression, referring to prolonged unjust treatment, takes its toll. When people in power fail to address the problems facing the oppressed, who are very often marginalized and minority individuals, an uprising will inevitably happen.
Violence is not a preferred action by protestors but rather a consequence of being ignored, criticized, and oppressed after numerous attempts to be seen and heard. Consider the George Floyd protests that erupted in all 50 states , marking what experts call the largest movement in U. These protests eventually spread around the world. These were not the first protests of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The first one occurred in after the death of year-old Trayvon Martin. In the years following, activists protested, marched, and led discussions of policy change, but the Black community continued to face unjust treatment, racial discrimination, economic disparity, and police brutality. On Thursday 4 August, Duggan, a father of four, was shot dead by Metropolitan Police officers as he got out of a taxi in Tottenham, north London. His death happened during an intervention with officers from Operation Trident, a unit targeting gun crime in London, who were attempting to carry out an arrest, reported the BBC in A inquest found the shooting to be lawful but concluded that Duggan did not have a weapon in his hands when confronted by police and had thrown it from the taxi.
By 11pm that evening, a double-decker bus had been set alight, reported The Guardian, and many local shops along the high road had been broken into. Burnt out cars lie in the road after riots in Tottenham on 7 August This is an attack on Tottenham, on people, on ordinary people. Then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson was criticised for not coming back from his holiday quickly enough. Over the next five nights, roughly 15, people took to the streets in towns and cities across England.
On the evening of 8 August, the riots claimed two lives: Trevor Ellis, 26, was found with bullet wounds in a car in Croydon and Richard Bowes, 68, was critically injured trying to put out a fire. He later died from his injuries. Hours after the verdicts were announced, outrage and protest turned to violence as the In the predominantly Black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, racial tension reaches a breaking point after two white policemen scuffle with a Black motorist suspected of drunken driving.
A crowd of spectators gathered near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and th Street to watch Shortly after the School buses carrying African American children were pelted with eggs, bricks, and bottles, and police in combat gear fought to control angry white protesters Nat Turner, the leader of a bloody revolt of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, is hanged in Jerusalem, the county seat, on November 11, Turner, an enslaved man and educated minister, believed that he was chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery.
Early in the morning, enslaved Africans on the Cuban schooner Amistad rise up against their captors, killing two crewmembers and seizing control of the ship, which had been transporting them to a life of slavery on a sugar plantation at Puerto Principe, Cuba. In , the U. English Captain William Bligh and 18 others, cast adrift from the HMS Bounty seven weeks before, reach Timor in the East Indies after traveling nearly 4, miles in a small, open boat.
The hypocrisy of racism in a country that was fighting a world war for democracy fueled anger among many African Americans, unleashing one of the most intense periods of black political organizing and white opposition ever. In a second wave of the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black workers moved north and west during the war, finding jobs in aircraft factories and shipyards. In Mobile, Alabama and Detroit in , whites fearful of rising black militancy and competition for jobs and housing rampaged through black neighborhoods and attacked black workers, a reprise of what had happened in the Red Summer.
More than race riots broke out that year throughout the United States. African Americans were not the only targets; the same year, in Los Angeles, white mobs angry about a new racial threat attacked young Mexican American men. In all of these cities, the police swept in, taking the side of white rioters. During and after World War II, African Americans actively protested—both peacefully and violently—against racism and police brutality.
In August , after a white police officer shot Private Robert Bandy, an African American soldier on leave, angry crowds of blacks outraged at police brutality broke shop windows and clashed with law enforcement officials.
In and , civil rights activists in Chicago staged sit-ins at restaurants that refused to serve blacks. Those protests snowballed into a nationwide movement between the war and the mids. Fueled by growth of the civil rights movement, a third and enormous wave of urban uprisings swept the country between and The protests grew out of decades of grassroots organizing against racial segregation and discrimination in employment, housing, transportation, and commerce, both in the North and the South.
In , Martin Luther King, Jr. When peaceful demonstrations did not get the desired results and law enforcement officials used force to suppress dissent, protestors often turned to more disruptive tactics. It was a pattern that would be repeated hundreds of times over the next several years, drawing energy from the rising Black Power movement, which called for black pride, self-defense against racist attacks, and self-determination.
In Newark, New Jersey, 34 people died, 23 of them at the hands of the police. In Detroit, 43 people died, most of them shot by some 17, police, National Guard, and military troops sent to put down the rebellion.
The s uprisings differed from their precursors in and The later demonstrations—both nonviolent and disruptive—were led by African Americans, unlike the race riots in Chicago, Tulsa, Detroit, and Los Angeles that were instigated by white mobs.
In the s, almost all looting and burning happened in African American neighborhoods, targeting mostly white-owned local shops accused of overcharging black customers for inferior goods. Some whites joined in vandalizing stores, but the crowds and the business districts affected were overwhelmingly black.
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