The devastation and resistance of Watts sent a powerful signal to Huey and Bobby, two men in their twenties, that Black folks were ready and willing to fight and, if need be, to die for their freedom. Huey would later write in his personal and political autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide:
One must relate to the history of one’s community and its future. Everything we had seen convinced us that our time had come.
Out of this need sprang the Black Panther Party. Bobby and I finally had no choice but to form an organization that would involve the lower-class brothers.4
Watts raises the question of the social role of mass violence in the shaping and formation of public policy.5
It is, too, a measure of the power of the corporate, white supremacist media that the term riot almost invariably evokes imagery of Black folks tearing through the streets in a frenzied orgy of destruction. But in fact, most riots were the instruments of whites, who used mass violence to terrorize Blacks and deny them citizenship.
Joe R. Feagin, a past president of the American Sociological Association, has written of the white riots of the early twentieth century:
Whites sometimes used violence to enforce informal patterns of discrimination. During one white-generated riot in 1900 in New York, a mostly Irish police force encouraged whites to attack black men, women, and children. One of the most serious riots occurred in 1917 in East St. Louis. There white workers, viewing black immigrants from the South as a job threat, violently attacked a black community. Thirty-nine black residents and nine white attackers were killed. This was followed in 1919 by a string of white riots from Chicago to Charleston.6
This racist mass violence was an important factor in the enlistment of millions of white men (not to mention at least half a million white women!) to support the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) between 1910 and 1930. In that period, Klan affiliation was a ticket to political success, as Warren G. Harding and Hugo Black both knew well. The Klan and like-minded groups waged open war against entire Black communities, and the dead cannot now be calculated.
In Black historical literature, notably in the writings of Du Bois, 1919 is known and remembered as Red Summer, for the explosions of violence against Black life throughout the US. A similar recollection does not seem to disturb the slumber of white historians. There were twenty-six white riots in 1919 alone, with major ones in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Phillips County, Arkansas; and Washington, DC.7 Even before this bloody period, white riots against Blacks were far from rare. In 1863, the so-called Draft Riots of New York City left at least one hundred people dead (the majority of them Black). That event, sparked by Irish who opposed both the aims and the necessity of the Civil War, marked the deadliest riot in US history.
White workers were attacking Blacks to sustain their social dominance, an assertion (and grim celebration) of their new-found status in the Americas as whites (as opposed to Irish—a subordinate group under British domination in their homeland).
The violence of these whites may be termed reactionary violence, as their actions served to consolidate repressive social arrangements. The violence of Watts, coming as a reaction to the violence of State actors—beating, harassing, or berating Black citizens—is not of the same order. It may be termed radical violence, or violence in response to the violence of, or on behalf of, the State.
Christiana Resistance
With this historical perspective on riots, we will look at an event when Blacks engaged in radical liberational violence, not to hurt whites, but to preserve their own freedom. This event also demonstrates how a term like riot can prove misleading by masking the objectives of acts of mass violence.
In most history texts, if this conflict is noted, it is usually done under the name of the Christiana Riot. Black historian Ella Forbes, who examines the conflict from an Afrocentric perspective, calls it the Resistance, to more accurately reflect the context and nature of the action and the explosive social and political impact of the armed Black resistance.
In early September 1851, Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slave owner, backed by his family, friends, and a US deputy marshal, descended on the little hamlet of Christiana, in southeastern Pennsylvania, to seize several escaped captives and to return them to slavery. Unfortunately for them, their human prey was staying in an organized, armed community, which had no intention of allowing their people’s return to bondage.
William and Eliza Parker were intrepid freedom fighters who emerged as leading members of a Black self-defense group formed to defend the growing fugitive farm community of Christiana. Their resolution and determination would be tested with the coming of the Gorsuch posse.
It is unclear why the Gorsuch posse, consisting of Edward Gorsuch, his son Dickinson, his nephew, his cousin, two neighbors, a newly appointed US deputy marshal, Henry Kline, and two other paid officers,8 knew to target the Parker home. Perhaps he had intelligence gleaned from the omnipresent snitches in the area that steered him to the dwelling.
William Parker, through his own contacts in Philadelphia, was forewarned of the coming slave-nappers. When Gorsuch and his group arrived at the house in the predawn hours of September 11, 1851, they initially entered but were forced to retreat. William Parker’s account gives us some inkling of the tone and tenor of the time:
I met them at the landing, and asked, “Who are you?” The leader, Kline, replied, “I am the United States Marshal.” I then told him to take another step, and I would break his neck. He again said, “I am the United States Marshal.” I told him I did not care for him nor the United States. At that he turned and went down stairs.9
Gorsuch, William Parker, and others present engaged in an extended discussion of the Bible, quoting passages from memory as if their recitations would dissuade either man from his deeply entrenched position. At length, they tired of the games and the true object of the meeting became plain:
“You had better give up,” said old Mr. Gorsuch, after another while, “and come down, for I have come a long way this morning, and want my breakfast; for my property I will have or I’ll breakfast in hell. I will go up and get it.”10
What the old slave owner didn’t know was that inside the entrance were a number of well-armed men. His son, however, standing at a point of elevation, saw into the upstairs room, sprang down, and caught his father before he went further, yelling, “O father, do come down! Do come down! They have guns, swords, and all kinds of weapons! They’ll kill you! Do come down!”11
The nine armed whites had not reckoned on five armed Blacks who were determined to be free.
When Dickinson argued with his father to leave and hire one hundred men to return to take them by force, William Parker was unmoved, telling them to bring 500 men. “It will take all the men in Lancaster to change our purpose or take us alive,” he answered.
Eliza Parker then signaled to nearby members of the community Black defense group by blowing her horn. This garnered an immediate response from the US marshal, who fired a shot at Eliza. He missed her, and she continued to sound the alarm.
Her alarm brought out some forty-five Black men and women and some neighboring white, Quaker farmers.
Eliza’s horn had signaled not only the neighboring Black self-defense organization, but the next phase of the resistance. Indeed, her role, according to William, did not end with the clarion call to the community. For when some inside the house began to weaken in the face of the threats from the slave-nappers, it was she, Eliza, who scuttled the idea of surrender.
William Parker would later write that she “seized a corn-cutter [similar to a machete] and declared she would cut off the head of the first one who should attempt to give up.”12 Parker later wrote in detail of his face-to-face struggle with the stubborn Gorsuch, who, by not leaving, apparently opted for his “breakfast in hell”:
I … struck him a heavy blow on the arm. It fell as if broken. I doubled my fists to knock him down.… Bricks, stones, and sticks fell