Abstract
In New York City in the summer of 1900, white residents attacked black residents over the course of two days, with the police force at times inciting the violence and joining the mob. What came to be called the New York City race riot of 1900 began on a hot August night in the racially mixed, working-class neighborhood known as “The Tenderloin,” or sometimes “Hell’s Kitchen.” On the corner of 41st Street and Eighth Avenue, a white man named Robert Thorpe had bothered a black woman named May Enoch, and a black man named Arthur Harris had come to Enoch’s rescue. The white man clubbed the black man, and the black man stabbed his assailant, who turned out to be a police officer patrolling in plainclothes that night. Robert Thorpe had assumed that May Enoch was a prostitute—she had been waiting on the corner for Arthur Harris, with whom she lived—and was about to arrest her. Officer Thorpe died of his stab wounds, and Harris, a recent arrival from Virginia, was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison.1
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Notes
“Policeman Thorpe Buried,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1900; “West Side Race Riot,” New York Tribune, Aug. 16, 1900, and “Race Riot on West Side,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1900. The main secondary source is the work of Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto—Negro New York, 1890–1930 (1963; reprint, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 46–52,
and Osofsky, “Race Riot, 1900: A Study of Ethnic Violence,” Journal of Negro Education 32 (1963), 16–24.
For a nuanced and important treatment of the riot that focuses on the experiences of black women, see Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010), 53–90.
Other works that discuss the riot include Ann V. Collins, “New York City Riot of 1900,” in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, eds. Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton (Westport: Greenwood, 2007), 2: 474–476;
Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 39–42;
Marilynn Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 57–69;
Val Marie Johnson, “Defining ‘Social Evil’: Moral Citizenship and Governance in New York City, 1890–1920,” PhD diss., New School University, 2002, pp. 319–360; Margaret Washington, “The New York City Riot,” interview for “America 1900,” David Grubin Productions, PBS American Experience, 1998, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900/ (July 5, 2013);
Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997), 69–74.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Power in the Story,” in: Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 2, 25 (quotation).
This argument was first advanced, in a different context and to different ends, in Martha Hodes, “Knowledge and Indifference in the New York City Race Riot of 1900: An Argument in Search of a Story,” Rethinking History 15 (2011), 61–89. Portions of this article appeared there, again in a different context and to different ends. As I noted there, Ann Laura Stoler offers the phrase “well-tended conditions of disregard” to illuminate the tenuous relationship between knowledge and ethical consciousness, noting the distinction between simple ignorance and more complicated “acts of ignoring”;
see Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2009), 256.
For historians of abolitionism reflecting on the relationship between knowledge and moral action, see Thomas Bender, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 255. See “indifference,” n.1, definition #2, OED Online. Sept. 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com, defined in part as “Absence of care for or about a person or thing; want of zeal, interest, concern, or attention; unconcern, apathy.”
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; reprint: Boston: DaCapo, 1991), 130.
“Negro Pastor Defies Police to Answer,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 1900. Citizens’ Protective League, Story of the Riot (New York: Citizens’ Protective League, 1900), unnumbered prefatory pages, 3, 4. For Brooks’s letters, see W. H. Brooks to Bernard J. York, John B. Sexton, Jacob Hess, Henry E. Abell, New York, n. d. (likely Nov. 1900); W. H. Brooks to Asa Bird Gardiner, New York, Nov. 22, 1900; W. H. Brooks to Robert A. Van Wyck, New York, Nov. 22, 1900; W. H. Brooks to Theodore Roosevelt, New York, Nov. 22, 1900, all in Miscellaneous American Letters and Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and History, New York Public Library (hereafter SC). See also W. H. Brooks to Robert A. Van Wyck, New York, Sept. 12, 1900, in Story of the Riot, unnumbered prefatory pages. “Negroes’ Public Protest,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1900 (Carnegie Hall).
Israel Ludlow to Bernard J. York, New York, Aug. 30, 1900, and Frank Moss to Bernard J. York, New York, Sept. 14, 1900, both in Robert A. Van Wyck Papers, “Police Department,” box 10, folder 121 (hereafter RAVW), NYCMA. Frank Moss was an anti-Tammany lawyer, a “prominent Republican attorney, counsel for the Society for the Prevention of Crime, and former city police commissioner”; see Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (1991), 548.
“A Betrayal of Trust,” New York Evangelist, Aug. 23, 1900. “Letters from Readers: Defense of the Negro,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 1900. On the New Orleans riot, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (1976; revised, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2008);
Ida B. Wells, “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” in: Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1997), 158–208; “Is it ‘The Barbarous North’ Now?” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 18, 1900.
Benjamin R. Tillman, “Causes of Southern Opposition to Imperialism,” North American Review 171 (1900), 443. For a similar point made by the governor of Georgia, see “Murderous Onslaught upon the Negro Population of this City,” Christian Advocate (NY), Aug. 23, 1900 (quoting Georgia governor).
On Tillman, see Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000). On the Akron, Ohio, riot of 1900, see “The Akron Riot,” Cleveland Gazette, Sept. 1, 1900;
Jack S. Blocker, A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State, 2008), 105–106, 118–119; “Immigration and Migration in the Industrial Age, 1870–1930,” in “Black, White, and Beyond: An Interactive History,” Coming Together Project, University of Akron, http://learn.uakron.edu/beyond/industrialAge.htm (Nov. 12, 2012).
“Waning Respect for Law,” Congregationalist, Aug. 30, 1900. William R. Shepherd, “Lynch Law and Race Feuds,” Political Science Quarterly 15 (1900), 752–753. “Survey of the World,” Independent, Jan. 3, 1901, p. 5. “Riots—The Church’s Influence,” Christian Observer, Aug. 29, 1900.
“The Anti-Negro Riots,” Watchman, Aug. 30, 1900. Tillman, “Causes of Southern Opposition,” 445; on racist anti-imperialism, see Eric T. L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and U. S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004).
“The New York Riot,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 17, 1900; on the Boxer Rebellion, see Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia, 1997).
Notes of D. Macon Webster, ca. Fall 1900 (misspelling in original), Miscellaneous American Letters and Papers, SC. On Webster, see Susan D. Carle, “Race, Class, and Legal Ethics in the Early NAACP (1910–1920),” Law and History Review 20 (2002), 112–113. “Negroes’ Public Protest,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1900 (minister).
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford, 2007), 7.
Osofsky, “Race Riot, 1900,” 24. Trouillot, “Power in the Story,” 26 (emphases in original). For the lack of press coverage in Great Britain, see Martha Hodes, “Knowledge and Indifference: The New York City Race Riot of 1900 in the Black Atlantic,” paper delivered at University of Erfurt, Germany, July 2010.
John Cooney to Walter L. Thompson, New York, Aug. 20, 1900, and Walter L. Thompson to William S. Devery, New York, Aug. 21, 1900, both in RAVW, NYCMA. Leon F. Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, ed. James Allen (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000), 22;
and see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 45–76.
Testimony of John Haines, Story of the Riot, 50–51; see also testimony of John L. Newman, Story of the Riot, 18. Opinion of Henry A. Brann, John Hains v. Herman A. Ohm, City Magistrates’ Court, Oct. 26, 1900; Bernard J. York to Police Board, New York, n. d., both in RAVW, NYCMA.
Testimony of George L. Myers and testimony of Mrs. Frances C. Myers, Story of the Riot, 63–65. Opinion of Henry A. Brann, George L. Myers v. John J. Cleary, City Magistrates’ Court, Oct. 26, 1900, RAVW, NYCMA; this case concerned police violence on Aug. 26, described as having “resulted from a riot on the west side of the City, occasioned by the killing of Officer Thorpe, who was done to death by a colored man.”
Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli, 1995), 468–471.
“The Official West Side Story Website,” http://westsidestory.com (July 5, 2013); John Strausbaugh, “Weekend Explorer: Turf of Gangs and Gangsters,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 2007; Kirkley Greenwell, “History of Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood,” website of Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association, http://hknanyc.org/aboutus/history.php (Nov. 12, 2012).
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© 2013 Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier
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Hodes, M. (2013). The Power of Indifference: Violence, Visibility, and Invisibility in the New York City Race Riot of 1900. In: Martschukat, J., Niedermeier, S. (eds) Violence and Visibility in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378699_5
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