Although rioting continued for the next few years, few outbreaks equaled in proportion those of 1919. Two years later, in June 1921, the blacks and whites of Tulsa, Oklahoma, engaged in fighting - which Buck C. Franklin, a local black attorney, and some others preferred to call a "race war" - in which nine whites and twenty-one blacks were known to have been killed and several hundred were injured. On hearing that a black had been accused of assaulting a young white woman, blacks took arms to the jail to protect the accused person, who, it was rumored, would be lynched. Altercations between whites and blacks at the jail spread to other parts of the city, and general rioting, looting, and house burning began. Four companies of the National Guard were called out, but by the time order was restored more than $1 million worth of property had been destroyed or damaged. The young black man was subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing. ...

The predominantly black town of Rosewood, Florida, was annihilated in January 1923 by a white mob from a neighboring village. The destruction resulted from a white woman's false accusation that a black male assaulted her. Rosewood was burned to the ground, many of its residents were murdered, and the survivors were driven into exile. Those who escaped "lived in fear that if they talked of what they saw . . . members of the mob would track them down and resume the bloodletting." Not until the early 1980s did some residents break silence. As a result of the publicity, investigations followed that produced a book, a scholarly study, a television special, and a feature film on the "Rosewood Massacre." In 1994 the Florida legislature provided reparations of $150,000 to each of the survivors of the violence.

In 1925 Detroit joined the ranks by seeking to prevent an African-American physician, O. H. Sweet, from living in a house he had purchased in a white neighborhood. When a mob gathered around his home and threw stones, a white man was killed by gunfire coming from the house. Sweet, his brother, and friends in the house were brought to trial. The NAACP came to their defense, employing Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays as defense attorneys. All were finally acquitted, but irreparable harm had been done not only to the Sweet family but also to race relations in Detroit.

On June 20, 1943, the most serious race riot of the war period broke out in Detroit. The months of tension reached a climax after a fistfight occurred between a black man and a white man. The altercation rapidly spread to involve several hundred people of both races. Wild rumors, as usual, swept through the town. Within a few hours blacks and whites were fighting throughout most or Detroit. When the governor hesitated to declare martial law and call out troops, whites began to roam the streets, burning blacks' cars and beating large numbers of black people. Nothing effective was done to bring order out of the chaos until President Roosevelt proclaimed a state of emergency and sent 6,000 soldiers to patrol the city. At the end of more than thirty hours of rioting, twenty-five African Americans and nine whites had been killed, and property valued at several hundred thousand dollars had been destroyed.

The most intense violence occurred when minority groups attempted to change residential patterns or when a number of Caucasians defined the situation as one in which such an attempt was being made.

The volatility of these situations was constantly reflected in the years following the termination of the war. Resentment against Negroes who moved into all-white neighborhoods resulted in more than a hundred incidents: the Airport Homes violence in Chicago in November 1945; the Fernwood Project violence, also in Chicago, August 1947; the Georgia house-bombings in May 1947; and the highly publicized violence of 1951 in Cicero, Illinois. Some of the weapons employed by white assaulters — bricks, guns, sniping, Molotov cocktails — were those which were utilized by blacks in the 1960's. Racial violence also occurred when Negroes attempted to use public recreational facilities traditionally reserved for Caucasians in northern and midwestern cities. In sum, the race riots which raged in American society from the turn of the century until the mid-1960's reflected extensions of white racism. The rebellions which began in 1964 represented a major response to that racism. (my emphasis)

... Northern industrialists began a campaign to induce blacks to leave the South and work in Northern factories. It is estimated that in one two-year period a half-million black people moved to the North.

The many blacks who made this journey found that though they were often openly recruited, they were seldom welcomed, for they were crowded into urban slums and faced a continual round of unemployment, depression, and indigence. Furthermore, they met the massive hostility of whites - many of them newly arrived in this country - who saw the black in-migrants as threats to their economic security and reacted against them with devastating riots.

Not a small proportion of the in-migrants to central cities are younger blacks who are generally better educated than those whites who remain in the cities. Furthermore, a new generation of black people is coming to maturity, young people who were born and raised in the urban black communities. They do not use a previous Southern pattern of living as the framework through which they assess their current situation, but use an urban, mainstream-America framework, usually learned from the mass media rather than experienced. These youth comprise a very large proportion of the urban residents and are less enchanted by the view that, although things are bad, they are better than they used to be. As such, they are very critical of attitudes of those blacks who see the situation of the black man as improving. A small but significant proportion of the new urbanites are young people who have graduated from first-rate colleges and hold white-collar positions in integrated firms. The subtle prejudices which they have encountered, along with the empty lives of the many middle-class whites whom they have met, have increased their awareness that there is a style and tone of life in the black community which gives much more satisfaction than that of the white middle class. The heightened interaction of black youth as a result of urban living, the coming-of-age of a generation of post-World War II youth, and the rejection of some white middle-class values in the attempt to articulate values which grow out of the black experience are some of the internal dynamics of black communities in the 1960's which are producing a new upsurge in [black] nationalism. (my emphasis)

The excluded groups today are mostly better off than they were a generation ago. They receive more attention, have more influence and exert more pressure on society than ever before. Yet they grow more drastic and importunate as their status improves. This should surprise no one. As Tocqueville observed of the discontent that led to the French Revolution, "Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated." So, while the failure to continue improving the objective situation will only make matters worse, we cannot rest in the comfortable supposition that continued improvement will solve our problems. The operative idea here is what the sociologists call "relative deprivation" — that is, a sense of frustration measured not against the past but against the future, not in terms of how little people once had but of how much they now expect. (my emphasis)