Four American Riots

The purpose of this essay is to sketch a taxonomy of riot, balancing what we know of actual riots against artists' representations of them. In English law the Riot Act enacted under George I, the context being the Stuart rebellion of 1715, referred to "the tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by an unlawful assembly of twelve or more persons in the execution of some private object," and this was called a felony, capitally punished. In his Dictionary of 1755 Samuel Johnson's first meaning of riot was "wild and loose festivity," and the second "a sedition." The two senses, legal and lexical, converge in violence, a term that covers both a demonstration that is extralegal in the sense of Carnival or Saturnalia and the purposeful physical destruction of symbols of the ruling order; the latter begins with symbolism but often expands into pillaging and thievery. The principled demand for rights and goods that the rioting crowd feels entitled to also offers opportunities to the criminal classes, who usually exploit the riot, returning to the "wild and loose festivity" of the first definition. Contemporary examples are the Watts and Rodney King riots, ostensibly for justice but branching off into pandemonium.

The riot tells us something about the failure of political and social organization in a civil society. The English crowd ritual was a fautede mieux substitute for ruling-order law, as in the "marriage auction" (described by the historian E. P. Thompson), which was the subculture way of dealing with divorce when divorce was only available to the ruling class. At the local fair the husband auctioned off his wife, selling her for one shilling to her lover, and then the three of them repaired to a local tavern and the ex-husband used his shilling to pay for drinks; they were thus in subculture law divorced. Thompson's term "moral economy of the crowd" referred to the fact that "behind every form of popular direct action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found"—what we could call "popular justice." The plebeian crowd rituals were extralegal and counter-theater in the sense that they acted out, or mimicked, the actions of their betters, as in the reversals of Saturnalia, but did not actually "live out" their actions. They burned effigies, not people. This was the typically English sanitation of dissent, the containment of potential rebellion.

When does a crowd (more than twelve people) become a riot? As a noun a crowd is a large number of people gathered closely together; but the word also denotes the common people, the mob, the mobile vulgus, the lower orders that participate in, and are transformed by, Carnival or Saturnalia; and as a verb, crowd is to press, push, and shove. As a crowd implies openness, it wants to grow, to consist of more and more people; it is in the nature of a crowd to be expansive and so to exceed boundaries, to destroy windows and doors, ultimately houses and institutions. What Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power calls the closed crowd (closed, organized, hierarchical, an elite; for example, a club, church, or congregation, a parade, procession, or column of soldiers marching) is in fact not a crowd but a group. A group opens up into a crowd.

When then does a crowd, "a wild and loose festivity," become a riot? When the constabulary or military decides it is one. While there are food, student, prison, and race riots, there are also police riots. A police riot designates a protest demonstration that has been turned into a riot by the police and, in some notorious cases, turned into a massacre. The Riot Act, at its worst, intersects with the festival riot, and the police or massacre riot can be one result. The idea that the peaceful demonstrators are turned into (called) rioters by the authorities and then themselves "rioted" goes all the way back in England to the St. George's Fields and the Peterloo Massacres, in America to the Boston Massacre and on to Attica and Kent State. Such a riot—or any riot—requires the official who...