Blacks newspapers focused on the wide range of violence that marked the late 1800s and early 1900s. The violence, in its most public form, included race riots.  Unlike those of the 1960s, the riots of 1890-1930 (as well as the years before and until the sixties) were white riots that targeted black people and property.

Increasingly, particularly after the Great War and its call for democracy overseas, the appearance of the proud “New Negro,” and blacks’ efforts growing out of frustration and the desire for survival in Chicago in 1919, African Americans fought back. Whether to do so–what good would it do? was it better to die in self-defense or face daily humiliation and threats to life?–was not a new issue.

New York Age, September 27, 1906

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