Violence, Corruption, and Cover-up: The Story of the New York City Race Riot of 1900

In the comparison of the New Orleans, the New York City, and the Atlanta race riots, several common themes emerge, which help to paint a broader national picture of race relations in the early1900’s. The first of these is economic and social stressors, which emerged as diverse groups of people were placed within growing cities perviously dominated by other groups. Godshalk’s research points out that the arrival of African Americans into the job market of Atlanta not only provided an economic challenge to whites in the city, but it also called forth a challenge to the tradtional racial identities and restrictions that had been previously accepted as gospel as blacks were now left to mingle with whites on a daily basis.¹²² The fears of southern white men of losing their status as the bread winner for their family was now coupled with their loss of social control over the African American males within the city, which brought about a crusade to retain the moral purity of white women at any cost from both real and imagined assualts upon them by black males.¹²³ Atlanta and New York City are similar in this area in regards to the challenges that these new migrants brought not only to the economy, but also to the social order and culture established within the cities and their ethnic neighborhoods.

The fear for the moral and sexual purity of white women is, however, something not seen in New York City, which surely those fears were present at some level, but they remained out of the equation for the riot there. Indeed the only cry for the protection of women in the case of the New York City race riot came from Reverend Brooks, who called upon the men of the African American community to protect their women from the attacks of the police, and also to keep them from being associated with prostitution in the area.¹²⁴ Here is a unique similarity with Atlanta, which takes on a different twist in the New York City case. The white men of Atlanta were worried about the moral looseness of black males and their impact on the sexual purity of white women and its impact on the social status and chivalric ideals of what a man was, adding fuel to tense atmosphere of Atlanta, which called the white men of the community into action to stop it. Brooks used a similar argument by stating that it was the duty of the black man to protect his family and black women in general from the attacks and arrests made by the New York City Police Department and calling them to action to not only fight the corruption of the city government, but also to fight the corruption in the community by avoiding alcohol and loose women, which brought the attention of the police to bare on the black race.¹²⁵

In the case of New Orleans, African Americans were also entering the city in hopes of finding employment and escaping the racial prejudice in obtaining farmland and employment in rural areas surrounding the city.¹²⁶ This resulted in a potent mixture of racial hatred, which presisted and grew in strength throughout the south as competition for jobs and living space increased within the city.¹²⁷ To further illustrate the economic competition between whites and blacks within the city, the New York Times, reported in August 1900, that African Americans were being used by employers in New Orleans, particularly in the shipping trade as strike breakers, in which a union member would be fired and replaced with an African American worker, who usually would promise to not join a union, thus breaking the power of current labor.¹²⁸ The mixing of racial and ethnic groups, influx of new residents, and the economic competition, which resulted is a direct correlation to the conditions that were present in the Tenderloin District of New York City, and Atlanta Georgia. These three cities are linked by their growing economies and their attractiveness to new arrivals due to opportunities offered, which were not as available in other cities or areas in the United States at the turn of the century.

A second common theme, which ran through all three locations was corruption seen in the governments and the challenge brought to their authority by members of the African American community. As seen in New Orleans and New York City both riots were sparked by attacks against the white police departments, which serve as a symbol of the authority within that city. For New Orleans, this challenge was defined along racial lines, and the attacks by Robert Charles and the support that he received from other African Americans in the city was viewed as a threat to the control and superiority of the white race, not just the city government.¹²⁹ As mentioned earlier, in the case of New York City, this has been interpreted by some historians as a racial issue, but there was also a concern over social status among the immigrant generations, as well as threats to the control over the city by the Tammany Hall political machine. In both cases these rationals help to explain, but not justify, the actions taken by the members of the police force against the African American community. In Atlanta the hostile environment present for African Americans, was only made worse with the addition of a racist city government, a generation of blacks who were not as content as their elders to follow the racial restrictions placed upon them, and a group of politicians and newspaper journalists who constantly stirred the pot to illicit fear that they could capitalize on for personal gains.¹³⁰ The police served to carryout the will of the white residents and the government of Atlanta, but were not at the heart of the violence initially. There was, however, a struggled here which is in keeping with New York and New Orleans, which is seen in the way that the police dealt with the riots and the aftermath of them. First, the police in all three areas either spurred the violence on by attacking black residents of the city either under the veil of justice as in Atlanta by arresting blacks who tried to arm themselves for protection, or as in New York and New Orleans, out of sheer vengence for the attacks incured by blacks. Secondly, in all three instances, the police made minimal efforts to put down the white mobs and restore order to the city, either in support for the mobs or due to inferior numbers. Finally, all three police forces can be viewed as the arms of the city governments, who either condoned the actions taken by these organizations, or by their own level of corruption set the wheels in motion for this type of gross neglegence and violence.

A final area of comparions between the race riots in these three cities comes from the reactions that members of the African American community had toward the violence enacted upon them. In both the New York and New Orleans case studies the black community reacted in a unified and non-violent manner to the riots and the initial killings of the police officers, but each decidely took a different course of action. In New York City, the leaders of the African American community, including Brooks and Fortune challenged the white government of the city through the legal system, winning marginal victories, not in the courts, but in the election of 1901, whereby helping to oust some members of the ruling elite of the city. In New Orleans however, African American leaders did not urge the concerted efforts put forth by blacks in New York City. Instead leaders such as Reverand D. A. Graham of St. James African Methodist Episcopal church, urged their consituents to abandon hopes of social equality for the time being in hopes of avoiding further violence against them, and instead focus their attention on the education of the black community to avoid the sins of Robert Charles, whom Graham identified as an uneducated and essentially worthless member of the community.¹³¹ This reaction was supported by Booker T. Washington, who urged vocational education to boost standings within the society, and to endure the conditions in order to persevere and make changes where possible without major confrontation.¹³²

As African Americans in New York City were pushing forward to gain a better status for themselves, or at least equal protection under the law, the black community in New Orleans abandoned advances made in the years prior to 1900 and created a pattern of interactions that would dominate the city for another fifty years, based on slow and gradual change through being the best that the South would allow them to be.¹³³ These patterns of interaction between whites and blacks was a product of the environment in the areas, whereby the North offered more opportunities for blacks to vote and participate in political and social activities alongside whites. The South on the other side of the coin was working to restrain the rights of African Americans within society in order to retain some level of the control that whites had once had over them prior to reconstruction.

The reaction seen by many of the African Americans in Atlanta, however, was to defend themselves, as was the case in Darktown and Brownsville, which was supported by T. Thomas Fortune, who called for revenge on the part of the blacks in Atlanta and to match the death toll inflicted by the whites there.¹³⁴ This is an interesting turn of tactics by Fortune, who was one of the formost leaders, who sought legal reparations from the police and municpal government in New York City six years prior. This change in opinion was likely derived from a sense of hoplessness that was seen in the article entitled “Atlanta Views on the Riots,” published in the New York Times on September 24, 1906, in which he is quoted as stating that the government and the police there have done nothing to improve the condition of blacks in the city, and have pushed for disenfranchisement and more segregation.¹³⁵ He also points out that not even the most intelligent blacks are free from the racial attacks there and that the death of innocents will continue until they retaliate against their white oppressors.¹³⁶ Maybe it is the sense of hoplessness bread by the conditions seen in the South, or maybe it was his disillusionment with the legal and political system that failed to bring justice to the police and members of the New York City mobs of 1900, the later is likely the case as he learned from past experiences.

This is not however the sole response seen in the Atlanta riot of 1906, as a new era of interracial cooperation was attempted in Atlanta. According to David Godshalk, the riots in the city forced white leaders to rethink what they had held as fact for generations, and they began to forge bonds, although weak ones, with the leaders of the African American community in an attempt to get the city back on its feet and reduce the chance of violence on the scale witnessed in September.¹³⁷ The black leaders openly sought this type of interaction and were able to make an impact in the governance of the city to some degree, and appeared to have used this as a way to keep calls for black retaliation in check in lue of a more peacful solution.¹³⁸ Another comparison can be drawn here as the African American communities of both New York City and Atlanta were united under the leadership of church leaders mixed with a few middle class leaders, such as T. Thomas Fortune and Edward E. Lee in New York, and Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois in Atlanta. This seems to establish the trend that is seen in the later emergence of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. There was also the creation of two social organizations in Atlanta, which were First Church and the Neighborhood Union, designed to help improve, protect, and united the black residents of the city, and ultimaltely to push for more social and political power for African Americans.¹³⁹ In essence these organizations picked up where the Citizen’s Protective League left off in 1900, as it fought to gain protection and justice for the victims of the race riot in New York City, through political agitation, due process, and working with white social and civic leaders in a quest to improve the status of blacks in the city.

The New York City race riot of 1900, has been long overlooked by scholars of early twentieth century American history. Those who have addressed it have failed to capture its true nature as a mark of the social and economic growing pains felt by cities at the turn of the century and have written it off as a foot note to larger events in African American relations with the white population of America, likely due to its localized nature and lower death toll in comparison to the riots in New Orleans, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia. Now that the curtain has been retracted on this event it is clear to see that it was not simply an incident of racial hatred, although racism played a role, but that it is a more complex event caused by a combination of economic and social competition, housing tensions and overcrowding, political corruption, and police brutality. Also in the mixture, scholars must consider the long and stormy history of immigration patterns and the interactions of these groups of individuals as they fought for their place on the social hierarchy of many American cities, including New York City, and ultimately the negitive effect that this pattern had on African American migrants as they too sought their place within the city. Aside from the causes, it is instrumental to understand that the aftermath of the riots and the actions taken by the African American community were greatly influenced by the events in New Orleans in the weeks prior to the outbreak in New York City, leading the black residents to refraine from retaliation in any physical sense, with a few exceptions, against either the white mobs, or the police, who often led them. The lack of reports by the police and white members of the mob of attacks carried out by African Americans the night of the riot or the weeks that followed, provides evidence of this. Additional support for this point can be found in the speeches given by Reverend Brooks and other members of the African American community, which reference the situation in New Orleans as support for their call for fighting within the legal system and not through violence. It is from these legal and respectable actions, that the African American leaders and residents of Atlanta took their cue in trying to sort through the rubble of their rights in the aftermath of the riot there and to forge ahead in a better direction. It is for these very important reasons that the race riot seen in New York City during August 1900 was instrumental in not only the early Civil Rights Movement, but that the experiences of the African American community and their supporters provided examples of how things within the city could be improved by daring to challenge the corruption and injustice within the system.

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