The power of indifference: Violence, visibility, and invisibility in the New York city race riot of 1900

In New York City in the summer of 1900, white residents attacked black residents over the course of two days, with the police force at times inciting the violence and joining the mob. What came to be called the New York City race riot of 1900 began on a hot August night in the racially mixed, working-class neighborhood known as “The Tenderloin," or sometimes “Hell’s Kitchen." On the corner of 41st Street and Eighth Avenue, a white man named Robert Thorpe had bothered a black woman named May Enoch, and a black man named Arthur Harris had come to Enoch’s rescue. The white man clubbed the black man, and the black man stabbed his assailant, who turned out to be a police officer patrolling in plainclothes that night. Robert Thorpe had assumed that May Enoch was a prostitute-she had been waiting on the corner for Arthur Harris, with whom she lived-and was about to arrest her. Officer Thorpe died of his stab wounds, and Harris, a recent arrival from Virginia, was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison.