Detroit Riots Essay

Though sparked by the Rodney King verdict, there were many other causes of the riots that erupted on the streets of Los Angeles on April 29, 1992. The Los Angeles riots in 1992 were devastating. The obvious issue portrayed through the media was black versus white. If you did not live in Los Angeles or California chances are you did not hear full coverage of the story, you heard a simple cut and dry portrayal of the events in South Central. If you heard one thing about the riots, it was that there was a man named Rodney King and he was a black male beaten with excessive force by four white Los Angeles police officers on Los Angeles concrete. The media portrayed the riots as black rage on the streets due to the

B) The arrest by police of a bartender and 82 customers at a "blind pig" in the dilapidated, predominantly black 12th Street area.

the riots in the first place. Another reason why New York City was overrun with followers of the

We have always had racial riots since the beginning of American history, from the Stono Rebellion to Charlottesville. Each riot has a reason behind it, for Stono, it was a tribute to the resist of African Americans to the oppressive system of slavery. During the lynching

Among the copious amounts of race riots arising in many parts of the United States, the Chicago race riot is the most recognizable. On July 27, 1919, a black boy named Eugene Williams was stoned by whites and drowned in the 29th street beach after accidentally swimming into white claimed territory. While this angered African Americans, the refusal by police to arrest the offenders of the attack infuriated them even more. The incident caused a full blown race riot, leaving 23 blacks and 15 whites dead, 537 people injured, and 1,000 black families homeless over a 13 period. In Washington D.C., four whites were killed along with two blacks, however, in Phillips County, Arkansas, 25 African Americans and 5 whites were declared officially dead,

It occurred when a white mob started attacking residents and businesses of the African-American community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in what is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States. Although the riot itself lasted only a few hours, its repercussions are still felt today. The riot started after a young black man was accused of having sexual contact and raping a young white female who was operating an elevator. He was later taken into custody and rumors raced all throughout the Negro Community. Over 800 people had to be taken to the hospitals and over 6,000 negroes were taken into custody. Tulsa Policemen made every negro evacuate their homes. “After the homes vacated,” said one Greenwood resident, “one bunch of whites would come in and loot. Even women with shopping bags would come in, open drawers, take every kind of finery from clothing to silverware and jewelry. Men were carrying out the furniture, cursing as they do so, saying, ‘These damned Negroes have better things than lots of white people.’” (CITE) (http://www.tulsaworld.com/app/race-riot/timeline.html )

The Chicago race riots of 1919 were one of the darkest moments in our nations history. But something so terrible does not just happen over night, in fact the reason for this riot began with the Great Migration around 1910. The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million African-Americans from the rural south into the urban north. Of those 6 million African-Americans traveling to the north 500,000 of them went to Chicago 's South Side. The African-American population thought they were going to a better situation by escaping the apartheid practices of Jim Crow. However they were taken advantage of and seen as new competition to the northern white population. Nine years later during the summer of 1919, two years after World War I ended, the American society suffered from a racial tension that it has never seen before. The racial tension brewed from the demobilization of black and white

The Civil War was fought over the “race problem,” to determine the place of African-Americans in America. The Union won the war and freed the slaves. However, when President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, a hopeful promise for freedom from oppression and slavery for African-Americans, he refrained from announcing the decades of hardship that would follow to obtaining the new won “freedom”. Over the course of nearly a century, African-Americans would be deprived and face adversity to their rights. They faced something perhaps worse than slavery; plagued with the threat of being lynched or beat for walking at the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite the addition of the 14th and

This paper is going to present the view from the black population of Tulsa at the time of the riots. Events took place prior to the riot and created more tension to the race debate. These will need to be explained to set the tensions that led to the burning homes and brutal violence taken on the black citizens.

Urban Blacks were also encounter with extreme racial violence in neighborhoods and at work. Different ethnic groups of new immigrants obtained power and used conflict as a strategy of diminishing urban Blacks power level. They began blocking Urban Black workers going to work throughout new immigrant’s neighborhoods. Race riots have played a crucial role in the social establishment of race, prejudice, and discrimination across the United States. Race riots uncovered fundamental tensions in societies experiencing swift technological and economic changes. In 1920, there were many race riots and other violence in many places, such as Red Summer Race Riots of 1919 and the St. Louis Riot of 1917 that took place during the segregation in the South and the Black urban migration to the North. These race riots were response to the reality that Urban Blacks were carrying on a powerful struggle against White supremacy. During race riots, Urban Blacks lived through a renewed flow of riots, massacres, and racial terrorism.

In 1992 the city of Los Angeles was one of our nation’s largest cities. It had an estimated population of over 9 million.1 The city had been in a deteriorating state for several years. There also had been tension growing between the citizens and the police for nearly the last 30 years. This had a lot to do with riots that occurred in Los Angeles back in the 1960’s.2

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

The riots helped bring a change to the community for the African Americans because before the riots they didn't have a voice, any protest or march they did didn't receive attention. When the riots happened, they got the attention that they were searching for. The communities were said to be too "poor" to care about them. In the article Sandy banks publish it said "The devastation was heartbreaking, but I understood the rage behind it. Los Angeles had been building to this moment, with years of protests, meetings, and marches that got little attention outside a black community seemed too wretched and too poor to care about." Los Angeles was going to have a breakout sooner or later due to the little attention put for the communities that were in need. The communities felt that with Rodney King, they finally had a voice. For the community Rodney King was their voice because of him the people

They were also arrested. (Auerbach 1688) That's all it took for this riot to come into play, a few people unhappy about the way the police handled the situation. The next thing you know its a few thousand unhappy people.

Detroit is a very well-known and diverse city. “Somewhere behind its neglected, graffiti covered skyscrapers are charming reminders of a city that was once among the world’s wealthiest” (Gray). This city has been through a lot. Detroit was first founded by the French in 1701 and then used as a fur trade post. Jumping a little in the future, it has had riots and protest for equal rights among its busy streets. Detroit is also known as the Motor City. “By the mid-twentieth century one in every six working Americans was employed directly or indirectly by the automotive industry” (Sugrue). Yet after everything this city has endured Detroit is thought of as a place of fear. It has a lot of history and has a lot to offer if people would let