“Streets a Battle Ground”: Racial Violence in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1911–1919, and the Limits of Southern Exceptionalism
Abstract:
Pennsylvania exploded into spectacular racial violence more than a dozen times between 1910 and 1919. Of these, the two most violent—the 1911 lynching of Zachariah Walker and the 1918 Philadelphia race riot—occurred in southeastern Pennsylvania. This paper challenges the narrative that racial violence is and has been exceptionally Southern and that events occurring north of the Mason-Dixon line were, themselves, exceptional, as well as the current academic parochialism of addressing lynchings and race riots as two discrete events. By examining in depth these incidents of racial violence in the Keystone State, both of which being representative of lynchings and riots throughout the country, it can be seen that lynchings and race riots were not exceptional to the South, nor were they cut of two different cloths. Instead, the two existed on a spectrum of antiblack collective violence which was extant throughout the entire county.