carry out their atrocities in a euphoric frenzy and afterward feel no remorse for what they see as a justifiable response to an intolerable provocation. An ethnic riot doesn’t destroy the targeted group, but it kills far greater numbers than terrorism; the death toll averages around a dozen but can range into the hundreds, the thousands, or (as in the nationwide rioting after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947) the hundreds of thousands. Deadly ethnic riots can be an effective means of ethnic cleansing, sending millions of refugees from their homes in fear of their lives. And like terrorism, deadly riots can exact enormous costs in money and fear, leading to martial law, the abrogation of democracy, coups d’état, and secessionist warfare.4
Deadly ethnic riots are by no means an innovation of the 20th century. Pogrom is a Russian word that was applied to the frequent anti-Jewish riots in the 19th-century Pale of Settlement, which were just the latest wave in a millennium of intercommunal killings of Jews in Europe. In the 17th and 18th centuries England was swept by hundreds of deadly riots targeting Catholics. One response was a piece of legislation that a magistrate would publicly recite to a mob threatening them with execution if they did not immediately disperse. We remember this crowd-control measure in the expression to read them the Riot Act.5
The United States also has a long history of intercommunal violence. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries just about every religious group came under assault in deadly riots, including Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, together with immigrant communities such as Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish, and Chinese.6 And as we saw in chapter 6, intercommunal violence against some Native American peoples was so complete that it can be placed in the category of genocide. Though the federal government did not perpetrate any overt genocides, it carried out several ethnic cleansings. The forced expulsion of “five civilized tribes” along the Trail of Tears from their southeastern homelands to present-day Oklahoma resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands from disease, hunger, and exposure. As recently as the 1940s, a hundred thousand Japanese Americans were forced into concentration camps because they were of the same race as the nation the country was fighting.
But the longest-running victims of intercommunal and government-indulged violence were African Americans.7 Though we tend to think of lynching as a phenomenon of the American South, two of the most atrocious incidents took place in New York City: a 1741 rampage following rumors of a slave revolt in which many African Americans were burned at the stake, and the 1863 draft riots (depicted in the 2002 film Gangs of New York) in which at least fifty were lynched. In some years in the postbellum South, thousands of African Americans were killed, and the early 20th century saw race riots killing dozens at a time in more than twenty-five cites.8
Rioting of all kinds began to decrease in Europe in the mid-19th century. In the United States deadly rioting began to diminish at the century’s end, and by the 1920s it had entered a terminal decline.9 Using figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, James Payne tabulated the number of lynchings beginning in 1882 and found that they fell precipitously from 1890 to the 1940s (figure 7–2). During these decades, horrific lynchings continued to make the news, and shocking photographs of hanged and burned corpses were published in newspapers and circulated among activists, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A 1930 photograph of a pair of men hanged in Indiana inspired a schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol to write a poem in protest:Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
FIGURE 7–2. Lynchings in the United States, 1882–1969
Source: Graph from Payne, 2004, p. 182.
(Meeropol and his wife, Anne, would later adopt the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after the couple had been executed for Julius’s passing of nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.) When Meeropol put the poem to music, it became the signature tune of Billie Holiday, and in 1999 Time magazine called it the song of the century.10 Yet in one of those paradoxes of timing that we have often stumbled upon, the conspicuous protest emerged at a time when the crime had already long been in decline. The last famous lynching case came to light in 1955, when fourteen-year-old Emmett Till