White mob violence met Black families who moved into white neighborhoods.

Evidence

Often the precise causes and triggers of white fear and rage were mixed or unclear, but the consequences were always devastating. Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand Black men, women, and children lost their lives to lynching. Fleeing violence, harsh segregation laws, and exploitative economic conditions, many Black Americans headed north, in what would become known as the Great Migration, to take advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War and to achieve some modicum of safety. Unfortunately, many soon realized that white mob violence reigned there as well. One of the bloodiest race massacres in the twentieth century occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. That tragedy involved a spree of lynchings, mayhem, and brutal burnings of people and buildings that left an official death toll of at least thirty-nine Black and eight white Americans, though historians estimate that more than a hundred Black people were actually killed. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 389 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Working with FCS’s homeownership program, Mary and her husband took classes in budgeting, saved up their down payment and obtained a mortgage, and moved into their home—a four-bedroom one-bath that they converted into a three-bedroom two-bath to accommodate their children—in 2008. … “We was in our forties, and most people that lived on the street was a lot older. And we were black, and most of them white,” she recalls. “And they used to come down and walk down the side of my house, watching us. It was like they was keeping an eye on us—you know, are they going to be a rowdy bunch, or whatever?” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1273 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black northern migration met epidemic white urban violence through 1919 — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 865; White working-class Atlanta neighborhoods were socially cohesive webs of work, kin, and residence. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 205; White neighbors surveilled a black family newly arrived on their street — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 1273 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• White mob violence followed Black migrants north rather than ending at the Mason-Dixon line #corroborates (0.95) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 389
• White neighbors surveilled a black family newly arrived on their street #expands (0.90) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1273
• White neighbors terrorized Black families until they fled white neighborhoods. #qualifies (0.85) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 479
• Law enforcement itself led mobs that brutalized Black families and then charged the victims #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 907
• White neighbors harassed Black homebuyers in racially integrated 1970s Mississippi. #expands (0.85)
• Black homeowners in white neighborhoods live in fear of being killed with impunity #expands (0.85) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1269
• White homeowners performed community solidarity as a defensive strategy against desegregation #expands (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 190
• Perceived Black labor competition directly triggered white mob violence #complicates (0.75) — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 447
• Whites who sold to blacks faced threats and harassment from their own neighbors #complicates (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 220
• Whites linked their children’s safety in public space directly to neighborhood racial composition #complicates (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 207