August 7, 2019 One hundred years ago this week, writer Jelani Cobb reminds us, a seventeen-year-old black teen named Eugene Williams attempted to beat the Chicago heat by swimming in Lake Michigan with his friends. When he drifted too close to a whites-only beach, a man named George Stauber threw rocks at his head. The boy was struck and drowned. That incident triggered eight days of arson and violence (little) known as the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.
But tensions had been simmering for a long while.
"Thousands of black soldiers returning from the First World War competed against white workers for employment and housing. The veterans brought with them a renewed intolerance for discrimination," Cobb says. "Other African-Americans, newly arrived migrants from the South, as part of what became known as the Great Migration, were viewed as interlopers whose willingness to work for low pay undercut the wages of white men. As the poet Eve Ewing notes in her searing collection '1919,' white Chicagoans attributed the violence to a 'Negro invasion' of previously white enclaves. The world had been made safe for democracy; Chicago had not."
Thirty-eight people died, 15 of them white, 23 of them black.
A hundred years to the day that the Chicago Race Riot was being commemorated in earnest, another vile attempt to stave off an "invasion," this one Hispanic, took place in El Paso, Tex. A young white man who openly claimed terror as a political strategy was about to join a long line of smugly entitled murderers bent on setting the border straight.
Monica Muñoz Martinez, a professor at Brown University and author of the book The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, recently spoke with Tanzina Vega on WNYC's The Takeaway.
She began by noting the long history of violence against Latinx throughout history, including terror lynchings carried out by white mobs across the U.S. But the period from 1910 to 1920 was particularly deadly. Historians believe around 5,000 people of Mexican heritage were either murdered or disappeared in the American West.
Texas has long been responsible for the lion's share of this violence for an important reason: It allowed state-sanctioned violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, often led by the state police known as the Texas Rangers, alongside local law enforcement, and U.S. soldiers. And they brought their friends. "When we think about racial violence on the border it's important to remember that it's not only acts of state–sanctioned racial violence, but that they were linked with vigilantes," she says.
She cites the Porvenir Massacre as a classic example of this unremembered history.
On the night of January 28, 1918, a mob of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers set upon the small village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. They removed 15 boys and men from their beds and took them outside and shot them in front of their families. The flimsy excuse was thefts at nearby ranches. The village was razed days later, erasing the evidence along with the story.
"It's one of the greatest tragedies that's unknown in U.S. history," says Martinez.
Despite decades of efforts of families and witnesses to find justice—there was even an archeological dig at the Porvenir site in 2015—nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime. "In fact," says Martinez, "there were participants who enjoyed long careers in law enforcement after the massacre."
It is history's truly grim duty to remind us of the rot that lurks in our past, like the way that law enforcement, political leaders, and the media have traditionally portrayed the Latinx population of Texas as less-than-human and inherently violent criminals.
You know, not the "best people."
"It shows that the deadly consequences of racist rhetoric not only leads to violent policing, it also leads to vigilante violence," says Martinez.
All the ugliest impulses doomed to repeat on a loop.
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