INTRODUCTION

“No Deed But Memory: The Public History of American Race Riots”

Elizabeth Catte, PhD

In public memory, rhetorical scholar Charles E. Morris finds “a purposeful engagement

of the past, forged symbolically, profoundly constitutive of identity, community, and moral

vision, inherently consequential in its ideological implications, and very often the fodder of

political conflagration”1 Unlike collective and cultural memory, public memory is frequently

discussed with reference to the absence of memories rather than their presence, making public

memory a contested terrain where individuals and institutions present competing narratives of an

“official” past. To make one’s memories visible to others is to legitimize one’s sense of the past,

a condition that produces and perpetuates social power. As sociologist and human rights activist

Elizabeth Jelin argues, “The historical present is constructed by subjects in dispute about the

meaning of history and the contents of traditions and values.”2 As such, memories that publicize

systemic injustice and individual trauma are often exorcised from past. This is particularly true

of racial violence.

This study examines a category of violence in the United States often referred to as race

riots in order to understand how narratives of this violence change over time and are influenced

by changing race relations. To do this, I analyze the creation of public memory projects –

1 Charles E. Morris III, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Public Memory,” in Kendall R. Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 90. 2 Elizabeth Jelin, “The Politics of Memory: The Human Rights Movement and the Construction of Democracy in Argentina,” Latin American Perspectives 81, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 50.

alliances of individuals tasked with the explicit goal to make elements of the past known – that

formed in order to assess the moral and economic debt owed to African Americans connected to

four race riots that occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Rosewood,

Florida, and Fort Lawton, Washington.3 As this strategy will show, the unsettled histories of

rioting became critical elements in public discussions of past racial injustice, to the extent that

the formation of community-based and legislatively mandated riot commissions and projects

became a new form of civic ritual in the 1990s and early 2000s. Historian Renee C. Romano first

used the term “civic ritual” to describe the extremely visible but long-delayed prosecution of

white individuals linked to civil rights era murders in the 1990s. Their public trials, she argued,

were rife with conflict between concepts of legal justice held by the families of victims and the

efforts of politicians to usher communities into a post-racial era by “fixing” the racism of the

past.4 Riot memory projects contain similar tensions and conflict. This study finds the first

memory projects began as way to facilitate legal redress for still-living victims but developed

into politicized projects that often privilege therapeutic closure for the entire community over

specific economic considerations for victims and their descendants. In this way, these riot

projects have not created the productive connections between past and present racism that one

might expect given the scope and nature of their memory work.

As historian Paul Brass argued, “To capture the meaning of a violent incident or riot, that

is, for the right to represent it properly, is far from a merely verbal game. It is also a struggle

over resources and policy.”5 At the center of each of these memory projects are complicated

3 I used “connected to” to acknowledge that many individuals who experienced these riots are no longer living and have passed their knowledge on to relatives and other members of the communities. 4 Renee C. Romano, Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 107. 5 Paul Brass, “Introduction: Discourse of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence,” in Paul Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 5.

questions about what responsibilities modern communities, individuals, and organizations bear

for past racial violence, and what debt these entities owe to African Americans in the present. As

such, a secondary objective of this dissertation is to understand how riot memory projects fit into

the broader national movement for reparations. In many ways, memory projects focused on riots

offer a unique vantage point from which to expand the public’s understanding of reparations as a

phenomenon that can account for financial and emotional damage to African Americans beyond

the institution of slavery. Indeed, such efforts in Rosewood and Fort Lawton have secured direct

payments for survivors of riots. Why these projects have successfully obtained financial redress

while others have not is an important consideration.

MEMORY PROJECTS AND MEMORY STUDIES

This dissertation uses the term “memory projects” to describe alliances of individuals,

organizations, and institutions that come together with the explicit purpose of making elements

of past known. Although this description fits many kinds of historical work, from the writing of

monographs to the construction of museum exhibits, I use the term as it is often used by

sociologists who study memory. In sociological literature, the term “memory project” is used to

describe particularly contentious memory work that takes place within communities after a

specific conflict has occurred.6 In many cases, an aim of the memory project is to “make room”

for contested or painful memories within a country or community’s collective memory.7 This

particular kind of memory work acknowledges that the creation of memories is political and can

6 Use of the term “memory project” is frequently found in, for example, sociological literature that discusses the role of memory in Europe after the Holocaust and in post-conflict Africa. See Carla De Ycaza and Nicole Fox, “Narratives of Mass Violence: The Role of Memory and Memorialization in Addressing Human Rights Violations in Post-Conflict Rwanda and Uganda,” Societies Without Borders 8, no. 3 (2013): 344-372. 7 Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989): 8.

destabilize existing personal and community narratives as well as “official” histories. Recent

public history projects have also used the term memory project to describe their work. The

Guantánamo Public Memory Project, for example, is an alliance of university partners, human

rights organizations, and activists groups that formed to “build public awareness of the long

history of the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba . . . [and to] foster intense and

ongoing debates over critical issues around “remembering” Guantánamo.”8 A specific concern of

these and other memory projects has been to keep the memories of victims of past violence alive

and to interrupt historical silences in the community in which violence occurred. The memory

projects discussed in this dissertation share a similar intent.

It is possible to locate the genesis of memory projects in the 1980s and 1990s, a time

when America experienced what sociologists Barry Schwartz and Horst-Alfred Heinrich call “a

swelling wave of repentance.”9 The so-called “American age of regret” saw leaders – both civic

and corporate – apologize for Japanese-American interment, the conquest of the Americas,

slavery, and the murder of Native American men, women, and children by government order.

According to public historian Robert Weyeneth, “remorse and responsibility” came to be a

primary lens of history.10 These apologies helped legitimize a new progressive political order

that featured employment policies like affirmative action along with a favored “civil discourse”

that reflected an unprecedented concern for human dignity, especially that of minority

individuals.11 However, despite the introduction of a modest number of policies, the progressive

8 See Guantánamo Public Memory Project, website available on-line at <gitmomemory.org/>, accessed 31 August 2015. 9 Barry Schwartz and Horst-Alfred Heinrich, “Shades of Regret: America and Germany,” Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory, 116. 10 Robert R. Weyeneth, “The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation,” The Public Historian 23, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 32. 11 Ibid.

spirit of the 1980s and 1990s rarely moved beyond ritual apologies and acknowledgment.

Although the “age of apology” created a synergy between activists and academics, it tested the

limits of symbolic gestures as a tool to create social change.

It is no coincidence that memory studies experienced a renaissance during this time,

which saw an intellectual turn toward conflict theories, multiculturalism, and a celebration of

minority narratives.12 In this milieu, sociologist Barry Schwartz argued that the past became “an

object of distrust and struggle . . . a mask concealing the interests of the powerful.”13 To better

reveal these struggles, many American scholars, particularly sociologists, turned to European

literature on memory by Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, and others to understand counter-

narratives produced by the disempowered. Describing the creation of historical memory, Pierre

Nora wrote, “moments of history are torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no

longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has

receded.”14 For Nora, writing evocatively about the nature of memory was an intentional strategy

useful to the critique of official, national history, the development of which also experienced a

zenith across Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Nora’s work on les lieux de mémoire – the sites of

memory – joined Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish

Memory, which privileged Jewish collective memory over the field’s traditional historiography.15

These and other memory studies produced at the time challenged the legitimacy of a static

12 Barry Schwartz, “Introduction: The Expanding Past,” Qualitative Sociology 19, no. 3 (1996): 277 13 Ibid. 14 Pierre Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 0, no. 26; special issue on memory and counter-memory (Spring 1989): 12. 15 Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).

national history and instead use the idea of collective memory to discuss the importance of

symbols, rituals, and remembrance in daily life.

Contemporary memory work generated a revival in theoretical studies of memory,

especially in the United States with the first English translations of French sociologist Maurice

Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory. Originally written in 1941, Halbwachs argued that the

“collective traditions and recollections” of a social group are both highly selective and highly

indicative of the system of ideas the group values.16 As Halbwachs wrote, “As soon as each

person and each historical event has permeated this memory, it is transposed into a teaching, a

notion, or a symbol and takes on meaning.”17 However, this complex and highly theorized

scholarship produced tensions surrounding what Kerwin Lee Klein called “the rigor of [theory’s]

use of memory with the squishy meanings of memory in everyday use.”18 In other words, by the

year 2000 memory studies reflected well-developed theoretical frameworks but also

demonstrated a need for additional scholarship as to how ordinary people understood and used

memory in their daily lives. This didactic gap was much improved by an embrace of memory

studies by other disciplines, particularly history and public history. By the twenty-first century,

memory studies bore the marks of its interdisciplinary nature by reflecting a new vocabulary –

“social memory,” “cultural memory,” “collective memory,” and “popular memory” – and a new

uneasy position among historians who, according to David Thelen, had traditionally been

16 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 188. 17 Ibid. 18 Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter, 2000): 130.

“concerned above all with the accuracy of a memory, with how correctly it describes what

actually occurred at some point in the past.”19

In order to create a more accessible framework for memory studies, some scholars such

as historian Kendall Phillips have employed the term “public memory” to refer to the ways that

“memories affect and are effect by various publics.”20 This framework attends not only to the

memories possessed by a coherent entity known as “the public,” but also the “publicness” of

memories, that is, the “memorial dimensions enacted in our repeated practices, discourses, and

languages.”21 Studies of public memory tend to emphasize the importance of museums,

memorials, commemorative practices, and public space more as sites critical to the formation of

public memories. In this way, public memory attends not only to the things we remember or

forget, but how and why we remember or forget them. As Fitzhugh Brundage wrote, “Architects

of historical memory usually work hard to sustain the fiction that they are merely agents of a

more universal collective whose shared memory they seek to express.”22 By recognizing these

architects, public memory becomes a key element of the interpretive character of history and is

capable of rendering new insight to the historian.

A growing number of studies take issues of race and place them at the heart of analysis,

and in doing so have, according to historian G. Mitchell Reyes “exposed whiteness as the

invisible hand of official public memory.”23 Due to the nature of this scholarship, much analysis

in this genre focuses on how white supremacy has directly or indirectly suppressed memories

19 David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1119. 20 Kendall R. Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 3. 21 Ibid., 7. 22 Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where these Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 12. 23 G. Mitchell Reyes, ed., Public Memory: Race and Ethnicity (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 2.

that counter dominant white narratives. An effect of these studies that expose “white washing,”

for example, has been a growing interest in contributions that reveal the omission of counter-

narratives in public school textbooks and history curriculum.24 Historians also find the erasure of

these counter memories located in generational differences and the “amnesia-inducing qualities

of monuments dedicated to racialized events.”25 With no monuments, texts, or individuals to

transmit knowledge that challenges dominant narratives, stories are simply forgotten. Because of

this tendency, much of twenty-first century memory work on race is recuperative and explores

ways to render memories suppressed by white ideologies visible again. An example of the utility

of this approach can be seen in scholarship of the last decade that examines the links between

memory and identity in the southern past.26

The erasure of memories that expose the horrors of white supremacy is emblematic of the

history of lynching, and as such, studies of lynching and memory have emerged as a distinct

genre. A number of these authors, like historian Edwin Arnold, have contextualized their

contributions as a way to challenge the “public silence” about past racial terror in places where

they were raised or have close association.27 Of particular importance to these authors is

unraveling, as Jonathan Markovitz does, the legacies of lynching and the histories of these events

beyond the moment of murder.28 Whether through local or national studies, these contributions

examine what became of the surviving family of black victims and how the continuous

24 See James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Norton, 1995). 25 Reyes., 8. 26 Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 27 Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue There is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 3. 28 Johnathan Markowitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

circulation of lynching metaphor and imagery in our own time affects black men and women in

the present. Within this work, historians have also discussed the consequences of gendering and

remembering lynching solely as a crime against men.29 Presently, few studies examine race riots

through the lens of memory, although Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak

have demonstrated the potential of this approach in their oral history-drive anthology Baltimore

’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City.30

As this dissertation centers public memory, it differs from traditional studies of race riots

in a number of important ways. Rather than delving into the minutiae of riots, it explores the

ways that black men and women felt, contextualized, and remembered these events in both the

past and present. In doing so, it places primary importance on what Jan Voogd described as “the

evasion of the difficult truths fighting the confrontation of memory.”31 This approach is perhaps

most apparent in this study’s willingness to embrace rather than clarify the definitional

uncertainty of what a riot actually is.

WHAT IS A RIOT?

A composite of most American legal definitions of rioting is that a riot is a group of three

or more actors engaging in a threatening or violent disturbance of the peace. For example, the

United States Criminal Code defines riot as “an act or acts of violence by one or more persons

part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts constitute a clear and present

danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any person or to the person of

29 Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Evelyn M. Simien, Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 30 Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak, eds., Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 31 Jan Voogd, Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 157.

any other individual.”32 However, from a purely legal perspective, a number of other offenses

match this criteria, including unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace. What, then, makes a

riot a unique form of violence?

There is an academic tradition that does not regard rioting as unique form of violence at

all. Sociologist and expert on violence Charles Tilly, for example, omitted rioting from the

varieties of violence he set forth in his 2003 work The Study of Collective Violence. Tilly argued

that a riot “embodies a political judgment rather than an analytical distinction. Authorities and

observers label as riots the damage-doing gatherings of which they disapprove, but they use

terms like demonstration, protest, resistance, or retaliation for essentially similar events of which

they approve.”33 Under this scrutiny, most incidents labeled riot dissolve into other forms of

violence and disorder.

Paul Gilje, whose survey Rioting in America remains the most comprehensive overview

of rioting throughout American history, attempted to craft a definition that did define riot as a

unique form of violence. Using “compromise and artificial distinctions” to navigate out of a

“semantic jungle from which we might never emerge,” Gilje employed a definition that

described a riot “as any group of twelve or more people attempting to assert their will

immediately through the use of force outside the normal bounds of law.”34 Gilje excluded a

number of notable violent incidents from this definition, including slave rebellions and soldier

conflicts with Native American peoples. Since the purpose of Gilje’s study is to examine how

32 See 18 U.S. Code § 2102. 33 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18. 34 Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 6.

rioting emerges as a defining feature of American “free society,” he argues that it is necessary to

exclude categories of persons to whom the state did not extend freedom.

Some historians have argued that pogrom is a more appropriate label than riot when

describing white mob violence against African Americans. For example, Ann V. Collins uses the

term pogrom as a substitute for riot while analyzing the period from the Progressive era to the

End of World War II in her work All Hell Broke Loose.35 A pogrom is the massacre of a

particular ethnic group, particularly characteristic of the killing of Jewish men, women, and

children in Europe. Collins’s work is concerned with the precipitating events that coalesced into

race riots, and she uses pogrom and race riot interchangeably to underscore the calculated

victimization of black Americans by white mobs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. Similarly, Charles Lumpkins uses the term pogrom to describe Red Summer-era riots

in East St. Louis, noting that one goal of racial violence after World War I was to force African

Americans to leave their cities. This goal created events in which “local white business and

political leaders, policemen, and others instigated, encouraged, or participated in assaults to

destroy African American businesses, institutions, communities, and lives.”36

Jan Voogd includes an extended mediation on the nature of riots in her study of the Red

Summer, and finds that many scholars emphasize the “combustible” nature of riots as their

defining feature. “The most common metaphor to think about riots has been as ‘a conflagration,’

occurring when a spark lands on combustible material,” she writes.37 In other words, the

perception that riots were, above all, spontaneous has often been shared by historians and other

35 Ann V. Collins, All Hell Broke Loose: American Race Riots from the Progressive Era through World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 13. 36 Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 8. 37 Voogd, 21.

social scientists. Voogd argues, however, that this model limits scholarship on riots and

particularly race riots by discounting the “agency” and “responsibility” of participants.38

Although she declines to create a new model for her own work, it is possible to infer that, to

Voogd, a riot is a violent space in which the boundaries of sound reasoning are set aside in favor

of values imposed by a mob.

Most recently, David Krugler has argued that race riots in the early to mid-twentieth

century are best understood as examples of collective anti-black violence.39 Although the phrase

“collective anti-black violence” feels modern, Krugler built his definition on two older studies of

riots: William Tuttle’s 1970 Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 and Arthur Ocean

Waskow’s 1966 From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960s; A Study in the Connections

Between Conflict and Violence. Extending this tradition, Krugler characterizes the white violence

of the Red Summer and beyond as “deliberate, methodological, and purposeful” against African

Americans.40 Krugler uses riot and collective anti-black violence synonymously but asks readers

to remember that riots co-existed with the institutionalized white violence of lynching, rape, and

other forms of individual torment inflicted on black men and women.

This study uses the term “riot” to describe violent incidents in Wilmington, Tulsa,

Rosewood, and Fort Lawton because these events are most commonly referred to as riots in

academic literature, in the press, in popular culture, and in legislative documents.41 Within this,

however, three of the four riots – those that occurred before World War II – might be best

38 Ibid. 39 David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 11. 40 Ibid. 41 Perhaps most significant to this dissertation, the legislatively-mandated memory projects from Tulsa and Wilmington were known as the Tulsa Race Riot or Tulsa Riot Commission, and the 1898 Wilmington Riot Commission.

described as “white riots.” For now, that term has little purchase although works like Shelia

Smith McKoy’s Why Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African

Culture aim to change that.42 The choice to use “riot” as shorthand, however, should not be

without scrutiny. One objective of work on race and public memory described by Reyes is to

“illuminate the taken-for-granted, normative force of whiteness in conventional public

memory.”43 It is fair to assume that, over time, forces of whiteness have shaped the language

used describe to these events. Although how and to what end remains a question for further

discussion elsewhere in this dissertation, it can be noted that tension concerning the terminology

is evident in many historical studies of riots whether explicitly confronted or not.

Indeed, many of the earliest studies of historic race riots have attempted to expose and

analyze a fundamental cultural lie about the nature of mass racialized violence in the past: that

white individuals were frequently the victims of mass violence at the hands of African

Americans.44 The reverse was true. Correcting this perception has been the work of scholars in a

variety of disciplines and is a significant element of scholarship that examines the Red Summer,

a period of unrest that inspired many of the first sustainable studies of rioting in America and

greatly informs the interpretation of evidence presented here.

In 1919, events referred to at the time as “race riots” erupted in dozens of cities across the

country during a period of racial strife that came to be known as the “Red Summer.” In both the

North and South, white mob violence triggered by backlash to the demands of black World War

I veterans overtook cities and devastated African American communities. “The red summer of

42 Shelia Smith McKoy, Why Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). 43 Reyes, 2. 44 Gilje, 89.

1919 broke in fury,” NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson wrote, “The colored people

throughout the country were disheartened and dismayed. The great majority had trustingly felt

that, because they had cheerfully done their bit in the war, conditions for them would be better.

The reverse seemed to be true.”45 The violence that immobilized cities during 1919 was so

unending that Jan Voogd probed not only primary sources for her monograph on the Red

Summer, but also the work of psychologists. Finding resonance in the concept of hysterical

prejudice, Voogd argued that “the Red Summer riots were characterized by an inability on the

part of white mobs to differentiate between the illusion of the perceived threat from the black

community and the reality that the feared threat did not actually exist.”46 As triumphant black

citizen soldiers returned from the war, their potential to displace what Voogd calls “the white

male domination of local cultures” created and extended a moment in time when the perceived

transgressions of black Americans brought swift and violent reactions from white communities.47

Scholars have examined these riots both as individual and linked events, producing

studies that catalogue riots in more than two dozen cities including Charleston, Memphis,

Washington, D.C., Norfolk, New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Knoxville, and Elaine. These

riots represent what Ann V. Collins called “the pinnacle of white riots against African Americans

in U.S. history,” a shared view among historians that has created a rich historiography centered

on the Red Summer.48 This richness has as much to with the historical possibilities of the subject

as does with time when historians first began to study American race riots. Between 1959 and

1981, historians produced a number of studies that looked to the past to explore the violent

45 James Weldon Johnson, Along the Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: De Capo Press, 2000), 341. 46 Voogd, 14. 47 Ibid. 48 Collins, 115.

disorder that characterized urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s.49 Of these, William Tuttle’s Race

Riot: Chicago in the Sumer of 1919 remains the most influential and is noted for its mixture of

social and oral histories that explore the experiences of ordinary men and women caught in the

frenzy of the riot. For Tuttle, this approach was useful in order to extract “meaning from

memory.”50 More recently, Tuttle has encouraged the next generation of historians to explore

other race riots, particularly through the lens of memory. In 2004, Tuttle called upon historians to

re-examine racial violence with “fresh lenses,” citing under-examined incidents in Tulsa,

Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida. Tuttle argued that such cases were not only examples of riots,

but of genocide.51

A modest amount of scholarships on these incidents began to appear in the 1980s and

include Scott Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Michael D’Orso’s

Like Judgment Day: the Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood, James Hirsch’s Riot

and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, and Alfred Brophy’s Reconstructing

Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation.52 These authors

examine black communities that experienced unprecedented violence in order to ask what might

49 Allen Grimshaw, A Study in Social Violence: Urban Race Riots in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964); Richard Maxwell Brown, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969); William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Summer of 1919 (New York: Athenum, 1970); Robert Folgelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971); Dominic Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). 50 Quoted in Dominic Capeci, “Race Riot Redux: William M. Tuttle, Jr. and the Study of Racial Violence,” Reviews in American History 29, no. 1 (March 2001): 167. 51 Walter C. Rucker and James Upton, eds., Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 864. 52 Scott Ellswoth, Death in a Promised Land: the Tulsa Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day: the Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996); James Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: the Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Alfred Brophy, Reconstructing Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

be owed, financially and morally, to survivors in the present. Historical interest in these events,

represented by contributions from Ellsworth and Brophy, has largely followed interest from

journalists like D’Orso and Hirsch, for reasons that will become clear in further discussion. That

the most valuable discussions of these events have come from individuals with backgrounds

journalism and law as well as history demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of memory work.

SCOPE AND METHODS

This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first examines the so-called race riots in

Wilmington, Tulsa, and Rosewood that produced three distinct memory projects: Rosewood

Victims v. State of Florida, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,

and the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. Between 1994 and 2006, African American

individuals connected to these devastating riots, many elderly and at the end of their lives, sought

official apologies from the state and federal government as well as material compensation for the

destruction of their communities. In 1994, the state of Florida adjudicated a 2.1 million dollar

settlement to the elderly survivors of a seven-day white riot that resulted in the complete and

total destruction of a thriving black community in 1923. Following the success of the Rosewood

claim, African American politician Don Ross convinced the Oklahoma state legislature to

conduct a formal inquiry into Tulsa’s race riot, which concluded in 2001 under the auspices of

the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Although the commission

failed to secure financial compensation for survivors, its work generated a sustained public

discussion of the events of 1921 and inspired the creation of other memory projects in Tulsa and

beyond. One such project was the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which sought to

recuperate Wilmington’s troubled racial past through the creation of public memorials,

educational initiatives, and economic incentives that directly addressed the legacy of the city’s

infamous coup d’état.

Although separated by time and geography, these examples find that African American

survivors and their advocates undertook three related challenges: to re-take control of the

incident’s narrative, to offer suggestions for appropriate pubic commemoration, and to assess the

financial impact and create momentum for economic redress. In each of the these cases, the

personal became political as a range of actors, from politicians to journalists, joined elderly black

survivors in their efforts to reshape the public’s understanding of and compassion for racial

violence in the past. These attempts were not met without challenge, however. While community

leaders, both black and white, expressed a willingness to acknowledge the pain of black

survivors and their descendants, advocacy to connect that pain to financial support, incentives,

and direct repayments often produced unpredictable results.

Although several of these projects produced extensive media coverage as they occurred,

little has been written about their legacies. How did these projects affect the lives of African

American community members after these projects concluded, and how did they shape the lives

and experiences of white individuals who both supported and challenged these endeavors? The

existence of these projects, how they unfolded, and what they can tell us about contested

memories are questions that require further examination. This dissertation updates existing

literature on these memory projects while examining their processes and outcomes through the

lens of public history.

The second part of this dissertation explores a memory project created through the uneasy

alliance of politicians, journalists, and African American veterans that sought to re-shape the

meaning of the Fort Lawton riot, a military race riot that occurred at the end of World War II at

Fort Lawton, Washington. In doing so, it uncovers a complicated terrain of military race violence

with far-reaching implications for those who seek delayed justice. In 1944, the Army court-

martialed forty-three African American soldiers for a riot stemming from a clash with white

Italian prisoners-of-war. The army also court-martialed three of these black soldiers for the

murder of an Italian solider named Guglielmo Olivotto that took place during this event. In 2005,

white Washington politician Jim McDermott requested that the Army launch an inquiry into the

Fort Lawton riot on the basis of recently declassified information obtained by an investigative

journalist. In an unprecedented turn of events, the Army issued retroactive pardons for the

accused along with compounded back-pay in a symbolic and material act of contrition.

Creating a context for understanding the Fort Lawton riot has taken this dissertation to

unexpected places: to Harlem, the deep South, and even to Guam. Although the work of

investigative journalist Jack Hamann on the Fort Lawton riot offers compelling evidence that

Army officials “covered up” information relating to Olivotto’s death, the story he reveals only

hints at the larger wave of racial violence the armed forces experienced during World War II. As

this dissertation shows, the events that coalesced into the Fort Lawton riot – widespread

discrimination against black soldiers, unchecked violence between servicemen, and the

indifference of the War Department to race relations – were not unique. Why, then, did this riot,

and not others, receive recuperative attention from journalists and politicians? And how does this

recuperative attention – the construction of a counter-memory – proceed differently when

African Americans cause as well as suffer violence?

Although a comparative study of memory projects in Rosewood, Tulsa, and Wilmington

would be beneficial on its own, analyzing a memory project about a different type of riot allows

for a much deeper discussion of this dissertation’s central themes and questions. How, for

example, do riot memory projects navigate the terrain of historical ambiguity, context, and

contingency? How do the white advocates attached to these projects speak about the

victimization of black men, women, and children? How do these projects negotiate questions of

agency? The Fort Lawton riot is, in many ways, a more complicated event but it also allows us to

ask more complicated questions. Unlike examples presented in the first part of this dissertation,

the Fort Lawton memory project successfully, in the eyes of those involved, recuperated the

public memory of the Fort Lawton riot not by rendering past violence visible, but invisible. This

observation affirms, as G. Mitchell Reyes has suggested, that the “hand” of public memory

continues to be white and that while narratives of these events do change over time, they remain

influenced by white opinion as to how black citizens should or should not behave. The continued

influence of white supremacy on these narratives is also seen in other ways, through the insertion

of “white heroes” into stories of racial violence, for example, and by emphasizing the absence of

“ill feeling” from African Americans toward contemporary white individuals for the sins of the

past.

It is my hope that noting this phenomenon, while also working against it, will be useful to

public historians who engage communities about issues of race and memory. Increasing the

number of non-white professionals in our field will undoubtedly improve the way we interpret

racial violence in the past. In the meantime, this dissertation offers words of caution for white

public historians – historians like myself – who eagerly approach these issues with the best

intentions but who might not be aware of how strongly their privilege and institutional authority

influence new narratives created in the present.

This dissertation offers original contributions to the study of military race violence and

the study of public memory while updating previous discussions of memory projects in

Rosewood, Tulsa, Wilmington, and Fort Lawton by incorporating more recent activities by

communities and government agencies. It exists as the first sustained and comparative analysis

of public memory projects concerned with rioting and engages with diverse, interdisciplinary

literature that is woven throughout the following chapters. Furthermore this work presents a

unique way of understanding how the knowledge of past racial violence comes to bear on the

present and contains lessons useful to sustaining discussions of contested memories.

Although disparate and separated by space and time, the examples presented here each

illustrate the complicated process of capturing the meaning of violence, a process that is often

obscured by the violence itself. But although hidden, it is a process of great importance, the

moral weight of which can be seen in the sheer number of individuals who dedicated their final

years to re-living events that many hoped to forget. It is also a process that continues and is seen

most recently in efforts to capture the meaning of anti-police brutality activity in cities like

Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. As Paul Gilje argues, “Much depends on the perspective of

the individual; one person’s peaceful demonstration is another person’s riot.”53

53 Ibid., 4.