A short, random history of “race riots”

 I write historical fiction, letting past events dictate the course of my characters' lives. Several books ago, I had a character heading west from Iowa and googled, 'denver 1880'—the dropdown choices included 'denver riot'. Turns out a Chinese fellow wasn't welcome in a pool hall, so they hung him from a lamppost. The subsequent “riot” involved the Chinese running for their lives while white folks left Denver's Chinatown in ruins.

Later in the same book, I innocently picked Oklahoma as a stopping point for the same character and googled 'tulsa 1921'. The first page of results revealed story after story about another race riot—this one dubbed a massacre. Here a black teenage fellow rode down a few floors with the white girl operating the elevator. Reaching the lobby the girl screamed. The black kid was arrested and, by the next day, a prosperous black neighborhood—Black Wall Street, they called it—had been burned to the ground. All this before the girl was ever questioned about what might have caused her to cry out. No charges were filed.

In another book, I wanted a character to travel from St. Paul to watch a friend in a circus and googled 'duluth 1920' and was greeted by a photo of three black men lynched for the rape of a white girl—despite the girl's own doctor proclaiming earlier in the day that his examination showed no sign that a rape had ever occurred. This didn't stop the lynching or the authorities across the bay in Superior, WI to seize the opportunity to run all idle blacks out of town and fired all black workers at a separate circus. No one was ever brought to trial for the lynchings despite a group photograph of the perpetrators that went on sale as a postcard.

These are random products of limited research but every town has its dirty secrets they've tried to whitewash from history.

If I have a point here it is that you don't have to look too hard to find racial injustice in towns big and small in this country. Nor do you have to look hard to find us white folks taking advantage of the opportunity—any opportunity—to capitalize. Take a negative and make it positive: git rid of Chinatown, burn Black Wall Street, chase the undesirables out of town. What's happening here in Minneapolis is no surprise. That cop took George Floyd's life because he could. Black man in handcuffs, white man with power. History—both ancient and recent—said he'd get away with it. 

In the murder's aftermath, this gas-masked man in black, armed with umbrella and hammer and casually shattering windows, seems a perfect example of the white opportunist. Start the looting, stoke the fires, after all, the worse the riot looks, the better the police look—even with the murder of an unarmed and handcuffed man caught on video.