Letter to the Editor by Larry Kerschner
Letter to the Editor by Larry Kerschner
While the horrible event that recently occurred in Orlando with the murder of 49 people by a man armed with an assault rifle may be the largest massacre by a single individual in US history, it is far from the only large massacre.
In the 1863 Bear River massacre near the present-day city of Preston in Franklin County, Idaho, 225 Shoshone were murdered by US Troops. In the 1864, the Sand Creek massacre occurred when a 700-man force of Colorado Territory Militia attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–163, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. In 1868 at Washita in the Indian Territories, George Custer and the 7th Cavalry murdered 150 Cheyenne. In 1890 at Wounded Knee almost 400 Lakota Sioux were murdered by the US 7th Cavalry Regiment
The Tulsa Race Riot was a large-scale, racially motivated conflict on May 31 and June 1, 1921, in which a group of whites attacked the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Greenwood District, the wealthiest black community in the United States, was burned to the ground. Over the course of 16 hours, more than 800 people were admitted to local white hospitals with injuries, the two black hospitals were burned down, and police arrested and detained more than 6,000 black Greenwood residents at three local facilities. An estimated 10,000 blacks were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire, resulting in over $26 million in damages. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 39, but other estimates of black fatalities vary from 55 to about 300.
The Elaine race riot took place on September 30-October 1, 1919 in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. With a total of five whites and estimates of possibly 854 blacks killed in white rioting in the county.
The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated massacre of blacks and destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida. Estimates of the number of black people killed range up to 150.
The East St. Louis riots (also known as the East St. Louis massacres) of May and July 1917 were an outbreak of labor and race-related violence that caused between 40 and 700 deaths and extensive property damage.
Not to forget the various massacres the US has been involved in overseas: in 1906 at the Moro Crater in the Philippines 1000 people were killed by the US Army; in 1948 on Jeju Island, South Korea, 40,000 people were killed by the Republic of Korea under the direction of the US military; in 1950, 400 Korean civilians were gunned down at No Gun Ri, South Korea by US troops; and we all remember My Lai one of hundreds of documented massacres by the US military in Vietnam. Massacres are as American as apple pie.