Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles (review)

In the 20^th century United States, the most widely-known race-based conflicts erupted in urban settings. While similar community grievances typically triggered unrest across cities, the form of rebellion, level of violence and socio-political outcomes varied substantially. In Race, Space and Riots, Janet Abu-Lughod provides description and analyses of major 20^th century race riots: Chicago’s 1919 and 1968 riots; Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant’s revolts in 1935, 1943 and 1964; and the Watts and South Central Los Angeles uprisings in 1965 and 1992. Abu-Lughod analyzes the factors influencing each conflagration and its outcomes, with particular focus on the way that race relations and interracial violence are structured by local political, economic, demographic and spatial configurations. She finds that the nature and swiftness of local political leaders’ response, particularly as evidenced by the course of police actions, was the most important determinant of the duration and severity of unrest. For example, she credits city officials’ ability to directly address community grievances and rapid police response with shorter, less destructive outbursts in New York than in the other cities, and points to elected officials’ inaction and the delay in launching coordinated police containment efforts as contributing to the escalation of civil unrest in Los Angeles. Political culture also influenced the nature and intensity of violence, as evidenced by the sophisticated political organization of New York’s black community, serving to lessen the severity of the racial crisis, and the relative exclusion of blacks from Chicago’s political machine, where the 1968 riot inflicted massive property damage on white-owned businesses.

This work also emphasizes the critical link between civil disturbances, the level of residential and social segregation and the concentration of disadvantaged groups within the metropolis. The spatial patterning of development within each city, and the demographic distribution of its population, directly affected the onset of unrest, the ability of police to suppress violence, and the course of action pursued by urban insurgents. The location of each riot – both generally as well as in terms of specific targeted sites, such as businesses or police stations – was predicated by the history of race-based power struggles over both space and community resources. In Chicago, for example, both events Abu-Lughod highlights were explicitly over space, particularly black access to housing in traditionally white neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, conversely, the diffusion of residential development and racial heterogeneity of the city led participants in the 1992 uprising to target not only Korean-owned businesses in the black and Hispanic South Central neighborhood, but to also attack Koreatown itself.

However, not all ideas are developed as fully as they might be, and some provocative themes raised in the introductory portion of the book are not revisited. For example, in her introductory chapter, Abu-Lughod briefly mentions the role of public transit in mediating the ability of police in both New York and Chicago to effectively isolate areas where violence was occurring, by re-routing buses and closing subway stations. In Los Angeles, conversely, reliance on automobiles hampered spatial containment. Angelenos drove into Watts to participate in the 1965 riot, and in 1992, utilized the freeway system to spread violence and property damage throughout the metropolis. However, during the later in-depth discussion of the events in LA, she does not return to this idea, and discusses broad distribution of unrest without analyzing the contribution of local infrastructure. Abu-Lughod also discussed a number of additional events – the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, for example, and several smaller incidents in New York and Los Angeles. These events could have worked to provide further illustration of her claims, or perhaps allowed her to tell a more complete story of racial conflict in the United States’ leading cities. Unfortunately, these supplementary illustrations were treated with uneven levels of both historical detail and critical analysis, with the result of leaving the reader wanting more information, or...