Our Riot History: Streetcar War of San Francisco

In 1907, shortly after the disastrous S.F. earthquake, streetcar workers went on strike against United Railroad (URR) demanding a eight hour workday and a salary hike. URR immediately brought in strikebreakers along with armed guards rather than negotiate with the strikers.

When URR attempted to run the streetcars staffed by strikebreakers, strikers and sympathisers threw stones and blocked the road. In response, armed strikebreakers began shooting into the crowd. Pitched battles where fought throughout the city with riotous masses pelting the cars with stones and bricks and the strikebreakers shooting back. At one point strikers took over an abandoned streetcar and sent it crashing into the barracks where the strikebreakers slept. By the end of the first day three where dead and over a dozen where wounded, mostly strikers and their sympathisers.

The battles and sabotage continued for nearly four months with many more casualties. In the end URR broke the strike, but the savage tactics of the company left the city bitter. In 1912 a popular movement for a publicly-owned streetcar line pushed URR out of S.F.

Read more, and with graphics

Our Riot History: The Whiskey Rebellion

Today is the anniversary of the so called Whiskey Rebellion. Twenty years after the American Revolution, still idealistic Americans rebelled against the government and the unfair excise tax imposed upon them (as they believed was their right based on the newly formed constitution). The "revolutionary" in power, Alexander Hamilton, raised an army as big as the army raised for the Revolutionary War, which ultimately led to a vast increase in centralized control over the American economy, and society. read more


Whiskey rebellion flag

Our Riot History, Soweto, South Africa

In 1976 the apartheid government of South Africa decided to start enforcing the teaching of Afrikaans to all South Africans rather than English or any of the native African languages. This proved to be the tipping point for the black students suffering under apartheid. One student told the World newspaper:

"Our parents are prepared to suffer under the white man's rule. They have been living for years under these laws and they have become immune to them. But we strongly refuse to swallow an education that is designed to make us slaves in the country of our birth."

After mass demonstrations were shut down, and protesters fired upon and killed by the government, the students resorted to rioting. Students attacked police and burned down government buildings, and the rebellion quickly spread across the country. These riots proved to be horribly deadly for the students, but their dedication and militancy pushed the South African revolution forward and was a major force in shutting down the apartheid government.
Read more and more still

Our Riot History: The Poll Tax Riots

The riots and demonstrations against the introduction of the poll tax by Margret Thatcher is considered one of the most important historical moments in British history.

The Poll tax taxed individuals equally regardless of their income, and in 1990 the gap between rich and poor was past obscene. The rebellion against the poll tax immediately spread across the country.

The scale and intensity of the riot and sustained protests garnered great rewards:

• They contributed to the fall of Prime Minister Thatcher

• They highlighted the huge divide between rich and poor in England

• Immediately led to the repeal of the Poll Tax

Read More!
Wikipedia

First Hand Accounts of the Riots

Anarchist Analysis

Our Riot History: Watts

The Watts riots where the first major black riot of the 60's. Sparked by rumor of police brutality, it opened the flood gates to decades of anger and longings for freedom. While most in the establishment saw Watts as the "dregs of society gone out of control", the participants and politically astute saw it as a political protest and tactical guerilla warfare.

What we don’t remember, what many of us never really considered, was that this was a mass political action that had no leaders, no apologists, no internal critics. The Watts riot was a spontaneous act of a people who had been oppressed, emasculated and impoverished for too long.

The riot was a rebellion, a naturally formed revolution, an unconscious expression of a people who had lived entire lives, many generations, in a state of enforced unconsciousness. It was about people who were poor and undereducated, people who had no motherland or mother tongue or even a history as far as most of them knew. (From "What We Forgot About Watts" below)

The result was too many dead and arrested, but also worldwide publicity to the problems of blacks in inner-cities, local empowerment and politicalization, and immediate local government action to address grievances.

Please read more:

What We Forgot About Watts

Here is a synopsis of the goings on.

White French guys chime in

The Watts Rebellion at 40

Also go see the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America. It has some great first hand accounts of the riot and commentary on its connections to modern day L.A.

"Violent Extremism" in the Homeland

The new Director of National Intelligence has recently stated that the U.S. economic crisis is a bigger threat to national security than Al Qaeda. A deepening financial collapse could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s. [read more]

Ooh, the prospects!







Let us give thanks to those terrorists of yore, to all the workers that gave their lives for eight hours of labor, eight hours recreation, and eight hours of rest, for dignity, and a life worth living. May we make such radical strides when our time comes, and snatch so much more out of the hands of the power wielders...no, tear it out of their hands.

Malcolm X on Rioting

You’re trying to drive him into a ghetto and make him the victim of every kind of unjust condition imaginable. Then when he explodes, you want him to explode politely!


scratchboard art by William Schaff

Last summer, when the Blacks were rioting—the riots, actually they weren’t riots in the first place; they were reactions against police brutality.2 And when the Afro-Americans reacted against the brutal measures that were executed against them by the police, the press all over the world projected them as rioters. When the store windows were broken in the Black community, immediately it was made to appear that this was being done not by people who were reacting over civil rights violations, but they gave the impression that these were hoodlums, vagrants, criminals....

And when you see the Blacks react, since the people who do this aren’t there, they react against their property. The property is the only thing that’s there. And they destroy it. And you get the impression over here that because they are destroying the property where they live, that they are destroying their own property. No. They can’t get to the man, so they get at what he owns.

Read the entire speech here.

Prison Riots!

The huge riots in a West Texas prison are a direct response from prisoners to poor medical care, this is not surprising as poor medical care in prison is a nation wide epidemic. People are dying in their cells from treatable ailments, communicable disease spreads like wildfire, mental illness created and exasperated by typical prison conditions. It's obscene people. I hope this action brings those folks some relief, already the local media is talking about prison medical care...

Overview of the Prison Health Crisis

Texas Prisons and Health Care

Health care crisis and women prisoners

AIDS crisis in prison



The prison riot has long been a tactical response to the severe oppression felt by the incarcerated, if you are not up on your history, please read about the Attica rebellion (wiki synopsis, and deeper, and video of Attica prisoners telling their story), it's an amazing and tragic piece of people's history, know it, spread it!

Uncovering Our Riot History, The Compton Cafeteria Riots

The Compton Cafeteria Riots in San Francisco were the first documented queer rebellion in the U.S. This story is amazing, and perfectly demonstrates how riots at the right moment have the potential for sweeping radical change. Not as massive, influence wise, as the Stonewall riots a few years later, nonetheless the Compton riots forced dramatic policy change throughout San Francisco.

For the short wiki synopsis

More amazing background told by the director of "Screaming Queens" a documentary about the Compton Riots

I love that the riot was precipitated by a group of militant street hustlers and queens call the Vanguard (whom I wish I could find more info on), a group partially organized by the local radical priests from Glide Memorial Church. Geez, the 60's had it going on, my friends.


Memorial plaque dedicated the the Riot at Taylor and Turk St.'s in S.F.
*Special thanks to Lizzielove for this post idea.