Twitter Thread on the NY "Draft Riots"

160 years ago today, New York exploded into a multi-day orgy of white supremacist violence. This event has come to be known as the Draft Riots, a name that’s at best partially accurate, but at worst contributes to two fundamental failures of collective memory. #twitterstorians +

The partial accuracy is that a newly instituted draft for the Civil War’s US Army was indeed a source of grievance among the city’s working-class white (& especially Irish, hence this event’s alternate name the “Irish Civil War”) community in this July 1863 moment.

But given how events unfolded, that grievance was far more of a pretense than a focus. This wasn’t a riot expressing outrage at the rich or protesting outside government buildings—it was a multi-day massacre targeting the city's African American community & their allies.

Over three days the white supremacist domestic terrorists lynched African American residents, burned down much of the city’s Black neighborhoods (including an orphanage), & likewise attacked the homes of abolitionist allies like Horace Greeley.

So the first failure of collective memory is a semantic but hugely significant one. Both “Draft” and “Riots” are inaccurate terms if we’re to remember fully what happened in July 1863—this was the New York Race Massacre.

(Note: I wrote about the broader problems with our use of the phrase “race riots” to describe white supremacist massacres in this @TPM piece many years back:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/race-riots)

If that all sounds familiar—a particular grievance becomes the pretense for a multi-day orgy of white supremacist violence & domestic terrorism targeting the African American community—that’s because it’s the story of countless such massacres across our history.

Thanks to a great deal of historical scholarship, journalism, oral histories & testimonies (like the new memoir from the last survivor), & pop culture works like HBO’s Watchmen, one such race massacre, Tulsa in 1921, has started to enter our collective consciousness & memories.

But Tulsa can still be perceived as part of the South, & thus perhaps these massacres too easily linked to geography. Or as part of the rise of the 2nd KKK in the 1920s, & thus perhaps these massacres too easily linked to a particular time period.

The truth could not be more distinct—racial massacres took place across well more than a century & throughout the US. Cincinnati had three distinct massacres between 1829-1841, for example: en.wikipedia.org.

Or there’s the “Red Summer” of 1919, really a year-long orgy of racial violence that included massacres in Arizona, Chicago, Washington DC, &, yes, New York City.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/06/considering-history-racial-terrorism-and-the-red-summer-of-1919/

So the second failure of collective memory illustrated by the Draft Riots is our continued inability to grapple with this foundational & nationwide history of racial domestic terrorism. NY in 1863 was specific as they all were, yet anything but singular.

Until we remember both this one horrific event more accurately & the even more horrifying series of massacres more fully, I don’t want to hear any more complaints that we focus on the negatives in American history too much.