Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Chapter 9: Race and Violence in Urbanizing Appalachia

By 1893, the barely ten-year-old city of Roanoke had become the economic engine of Southwest Virginia. A booming railroad hub with bustling machine shops and iron mills, the “Magic City” was on the brink of becoming one of the New South’s shining examples of post–Civil War industrial triumph . That narrative, however, suffered a catastrophic blow in late September , when working-class residents bent on lynching an African American suspected of assault went on a rampage that plunged the city into near anarchy . In the ensuing maelstrom, the city’s police and militia killed eight white residents but were unable to prevent a lynch mob from taking over the town and hanging the African American in their custody. As local authorities fled for their lives, the mob ransacked downtown stores for guns and dynamite and vowed to bury the dead man in the mayor’s front yard. Dissuaded by a local minister, the mob instead burned his body in front of thousands of cheering onlookers. Disparaging accounts of the “Roanoke Riot” in northern newspapers cast a pall over the city, leaving many to believe that it was on the precipice of economic ruin. Numerous stories blamed the mayhem on residents from the nearby mountains and countryside, ignoring the fact that many of Roanoke ’s inhabitants were transplants from the urban North. Such descriptions meshed well with Victorian-era notions of Appalachia as a place uniquely prone to violence and viciousness. What happened in Roanoke, however, was not as exceptional as the northern press would have readers believe. When residents responded to economic depression, rapid demographic change, and social upheaval with racial violence, they not only mirrored the reactions of other southerners but acted much like other working-class Americans.1 Race and Violence in Urbanizing Appalachia Chapter 9 The Roanoke Riot of 1893 237 Rand Dotson 238 Rand Dotson In the 1880s, no city in the South grew faster than the railroad hub of Roanoke, Virginia. Located in a valley of the Appalachian Mountains in the southwestern portion of the state, Roanoke had been the Town of Big Lick—a tobacco depot with about a thousand residents—until 1882, when a group of native businessmen used tax breaks, cash bonuses, and land grants to convince a Philadelphia investment firm to select the place as the junction, headquarters, and machine shops for its two railroads. Opportunity in the town attracted thousands of skilled northern laborers and scores of new residents from the surrounding mountains and countryside. By 1890, the “new” city of Roanoke had become Virginia’s fifth largest municipality and the fourth fastest-growing urban area in the nation. New South boosters, buoyed by Roanoke’s seemingly spectacular rise from nowhere , declared it the “Magic City of the New South” and described the place as “teeming with wealth, culture, industry, energy, and vim.” Its destiny , they promised, was “to be that of one of the largest manufacturing and industrial centers of the South.”2 Town boosters in Appalachia extolled Roanoke’s emergence as well. For unlike most industrializing mountain towns, which were generally the base of operations for extractive industries and typically owned by northeastern capitalists, Roanoke was an independent municipality largely under the control of natives, where manufacturing was the main source of employment.3 Roanoke natives, albeit with a helping hand from their northern benefactors , were primarily responsible for the intense industrial and demographic development that accompanied the arrival of the railroad. They were also the residents who reaped the most significant economic rewards in the land booms and manufacturing investments that followed. Unlike other natives trapped in industrializing Appalachia’s colonial economy, these men not only courted and welcomed northern-owned industries; they also shepherded them into place, served on their boards of directors, and mitigated conflicts between them and the municipality’s inhabitants. Having nearly abolished corporate taxes and guaranteed all new enterprises an accommodating and obsequious government in order to get manufacturers to locate in Roanoke, they also strapped the place with a chronically underfunded government, a chaotic growth pattern, and an infrastructure that failed to keep pace with the massive influx of new residents. Many of its dirt streets became impassable mud bogs after a rain, and its stagnant streams served as open sewers, which, coupled with a lack of adequate sanitation , produced outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. Race and Violence in Urbanizing Appalachia 239 Political and social conflicts...