Race, Sex and Riot: The Springfield, Ohio Race Riots of 1904 and 1906 and the Sources of Anti-Black Violence in the Lower Midwest

Race, Sex and Riot: Tbe Springfield,Obio Race Riots of 1904 and 1906 and tbe Sources of AntiBlack Violence in tbe Lower Midwest BY JACK S. BLOCKER,JR. n March 7, 1904, a mob broke into Springfield, Ohio's decrepjt city jail, easily overcame feeble resistance, and seized and lynched an itinerant Kentuckian, African American Richard Dixon. Dixon had been jailed for the fatal shooting of a police officer who was attempting to arrest Dixon for assaulting his commonlaw wife. The lynching took place in the evening, but despite the fact that the mob had been gathering before the jail all day the local authorities did not call for military support. Nor did they do so On the following day, believing the violence to be over. The mob reassembled that evening and carried out a wellplanned and coordinated attack upon the " Levee," a block of saloons operated mostly by African Americans . First,the entire crowd, T_ ILQ -, 4 THE CINCINNATI ENQ[„ IRER. 4.4 . AC' PAGES r... h... .. ELX'...... 8 - '.. n.., r.". Avenging Mob Battered in the Jail Door and Lynched a Negro on Public Square. Frightful Scenes at Springfield, Ohio. Slayer of a Brave Police Ollicer Hang, 1101 1: efu/· \ 4Ht." r,.. larpil Ir, ill!, 1 | li. \,· rki. Aill I H„ WI Dangle' of OHIO VAL. 1. EY HISTORY 28 lynching"in Georgia and Virginia, historian Fitzhugh Brundage concludes: Lynch mobs seem to have flourished within the boundaries of the plantation South,where sharecropping,monoculture agriculture,and a stark line separating white landowners and black tenants existed. In such areas,mob violence became part of the very rhrthm of life. Based on a sophisticated statistical analysis of lynchings across ten southern states, sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck agree. " Mob violence, they write, played a " fundainenti] role... in the niainteiiance of sotithern society and economy. . . . [ Llynching was an integral element of an agricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile labor force." xisting rallies indicate that lynchings in the North f(, 1]owed a sinijlar chronological pattern to those in the South.with the peak of violence occurring in the two decades around the turn of the twentieth century. My own count of incidents of antiblack collective violence for Ohio, Indiana and Illinoiswhich I am calling the Lower Midwestshows more than thirty lynchings,attempted Iynchings, mobbings, and race riots between 1885 and 1910, the period when such violence was most intense. When antiblack violence is viewed from an AfricanAmerican perspectivethat is. after taking account of the number of potential victimsits Midwestern outbreaks become, more serious matter than it has heretc, fore been considered. During the period 189099 ,fc, r example,the five AfricanAmerican lynching victims in Ohio seem a small number compared to the twentyseven in Virginia; but, since Ohio's AfricanAmerican population in 1890 was less than oneseventh the size of Virginia's,Ohio's rate of 5.7 victims per 100,000 of the population at risk exceeded Virginia' s,at 4.2. Iii the succeeding decade,the five lynching victims in Indiana among an AfricanAmerican population of 57,505 yields a rate of 8.7,topping Virginia's 1.8 for that decade and closing fast on Georgia's 9.6, a rate produced by lynchings of ninetynine black Georgians: No one has yet conducted an analytical study of antiblack violence in the North, where none of the specific conditions cited to explain southern lynching existed,although the new study of " sundown towns" by sociologist . James Loewen represents a significant step in that direction. A general condition, however,may have been present. If northern whites did assign African Americans a " place" in their communities and African Americans transgressed their prescribed boundaries, then the fundamental trigger of southern Iynching may well have produced racial explosions in the North as well. Viewing antiblack violence as a product of boundaries set by white racism and actions taken by African Americans that breached those limits at least provides a workable hypothesis, and one that places emphasis upon interracial interaction rather than portraying blacks only as victims: SPRING 2006 29 RACE, SEX AND RIOT dentifying the limits of AfricanAmerican freedom in the minds of white Midwesterners during the postemancipation...