The 1919 race riots were deadly but were not mass killings. Of the 40 deaths given in this dataset, there is always one victim who is murdered. This implies that it was likely a group of African Americans facing off with a group of Whites, the two groups probably had kind of verbal confrontation that escalated into coming to blows with fists, knifes, hammers or other makeshift weapons, or they just shot. Knifes and Shootings were the most common form of killings in these clashes. They’re most likely clashes because by far they all happened in a street, or some other kind of public area. The main outliers of this event are the police. Seven of the deaths have police involvement, two were police deaths, and 5 were police officers were defendants. About 19% of the cases involved the police directly, which is surprisingly low. This could lead one to think that the police were doing nothing, and the data does not really support this one way or the other. The data records if the person was arrested at the scene of the crime, while most of the data entries are blank, there are an entire 3 people recorded as being arrested on the scene – a whopping 8%. For the entries where the arrest time was recorded (most entries are blank again), most of them were either weeks or months. This paints a picture of a large amount of clashes taking place over the course of a week, where the police did relatively little, and strangely, more Whites (Or Other) are killed than African Americans who only account for 49% of the deaths. It seems that the African Americans put up a decent fight, which makes sense considering that many were World War One veterans protesting for their rights.
