Talk:Omaha Race Riot of 1919

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For a March 2005 deletion debate over this page see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Omaha Riot

[edit] Moved

I moved this article to a more specific title and am in the process of cleaning it up. Equinox137 00:57, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV?

This article does not seem to be very neutral. Most of it is seems to have been copied from somewhere which tried to make the event sound as dramatic as possible. For NPOV look at :"Witnesses say the boy was the most intrepid of the mob's leaders." The lack of sources is somewhat worrying as well. --Hydraton31 21:11, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree. It does seem like a copy and paste job with little to no citations, and rather overly-dramatic language for an encyclopedia article ("The mob in the street shrieked its delight at the last message." being another example of this). I've put a cleanup tag on it. -- Grandpafootsoldier 08:25, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree with concerns about POV. While the riot was horrific, I don't think an encyclopedia article should be repeating the dramatic tone of a newspaper article with a blow-by-blow account of every awful detail. Let readers go to primary sources for that. It may be useful for the author to look at other examples, or to get some distance from the contemporary articles, and try to identify what happened more dispassionately with less emotional language. What were some of the common parts of lynchings? (Sorry, but it's true, lynchings and riots are a kind of community control. They take place in other countries as well, even if the perpetrators and victims vary.

So what was going on here? I think it would be more appropriate to identify police mistakes and background issues, than having such detail about the playing out of the riot. For example, it appears there were ethnic tensions because of increased immigration, competition for jobs and housing, rumors of inappropriate behavior, crossing of boundaries (it sounds as if Coe/Brown may have been picked up because he lived with a white woman), incitement by Dennison and others, intemperate young male leaders going to extremes, and mostly male participants - so what does that tell you about the larger message? Rioting was both a crowd out of control and a way for disaffected men to regain dominance where they felt they were losing it. Crowds are very dangerous and emotionally volatile. Having them led by adolescent males certainly could increase the volatility.

Some of the article is unclear - near the end is the author suggesting that Dennison sent guys out in blackface to assail white women in the weeks before the riot, and then tried to accuse the administration of not doing enough to protect white women? These 3 paragraphs are all mine. --Parkwells 20:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I definitely agree -- far too dramatic. It reads like a narrative. 71.194.163.223 22:20, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Much of it was borrowed from a (public domain) pamphlet published in 1919.[1] Durova^Charge! 11:52, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] 20th century Play

It's not clear what the objection was to the way the play was performed - whether it was about using characters in "blackface", with those associations (which should be clarified); creating fictional characters instead of having actors appear to play historical characters; using white actors to play certain parts in which the historical people were African American. After noting both objections and then later widespread performances of the play, the editor doesn't tell how the play was received when performed in Long Branch, NJ.--Parkwells 20:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)