After Sunday night’s horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, killing 59 people and injuring 527 others, the news filled up with reports saying this was the deadliest mass shooting in recent United States history.
I was curious why it was necessary to distinguish “recent” or “modern” U.S. history. Is not all U.S. history fairly recent compared to the history of other countries? I soon learned exactly why I was so wrong.
This was an ordinary occurrence in the U.S. until the mid-1900s. Race wars ignited so many mass killings throughout early-to-middle U.S. history, and many are not remembered at all today.
A riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, resulted in the deaths of at least 300 black residents after a white mob raided a majority black part of town in 1921, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. The mob burned 35 blocks in the city, and about 800 people were hospitalized. The area was known as a place where wealthy African Americans resided.
In Elaine, Arkansas, two years earlier, hundreds of black citizens were murdered by a group of white police officers, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, though it is not clear exactly how many deaths were caused by the killing spree.
The Sacramento River Massacre in 1846 was a large-scale slaying of at least 120 Native Americans. Explorer John Frémont was informed a group of Native Americans was planning to attack his crew, so he found the tribe and killed most of them, including women and children, according to The Washington Post.
Another mass killing of Native Americans took place in 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The U.S. Army led an attack on the Sioux tribe in the area and slaughtered about 150 of the members, according to the History Channel.
The killing was first referred to as a “battle,” but it has recently been realized that the conflict could have been completely avoided by the U.S.
Here in the Bluff City, on the bluff in fact, there was a mass killing of African Americans by white citizens and police officers in 1866: the Memphis Massacre. It was the first large-scale public massacre since the end of the Civil War, according to the University of Memphis history department’s blog post “Memphis Massacre 1866.”
An estimated 46 black people were killed, many black women were raped, and many shops were burglarized and burnt down. While there were not as many deaths as in Las Vegas, this massacre was still a large-scale attack that destroyed the area near Beale Street and the Mississippi River and was a public killing of African Americans that came with no repercussions.
So, the Las Vegas shooting is the deadliest mass killing in the country’s history if you do not count African American or Native American lives, which much of the U.S. still does not today.
While the lives lost during all these killings should be mourned, it is important to know the historical scope of this era’s massacres. There was a time when not everyone was outraged over them.
