Nineteenth-century American anti-Catholic violence included deadly Orange Day riots

Evidence

A series of violent confrontations between Protestants and Catholics in the 1830s culminated in the destruction of a Catholic convent in Boston. In Philadelphia, Catholics’ homes and churches were set on fire by a Protestant mob in 1844.97 Each year, Protestants celebrated Orange Day, commemorating the defeat of the Catholic King James II by the Irish Protestant William of Orange. The 1869 Orange Day celebrations turned into riots in New York City, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Irish Catholics in sectarian fights between Catholics and Protestants. In the next year’s Orange Day celebrations, sixty-one Catholics died in a conflict with state police and militia. The media coverage of the events characterized the Irish Catholics as a savage mob, demons, and incarnate devils. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 296

Categorization

• CANDY: The Orange Day riots killing dozens of Catholics in New York is a striking fact most people don’t know — funeral-dinner material.
• XREF: Connects to the pattern of moral panics and scapegoating of outsiders discussed across this book and to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ dynamic of out-group demonization. — connects to: Anti-Catholic panic surged across the South and Midwest by 1920 — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1760