4. The Tenderloin Race Riots

On August 13th, 1900 gave rise to the worst rioting New York had seen since the Draft Riots. Twenty-year-old May Enoch, a black woman, was waiting for a friend outside a bar in the Tenderloin neighborhood of Manhattan when Robert Thorpe, a plainclothes police officer accused her of prostitution.

When Thorpe tried to take her in, her companion, Arthur Harris, heard her yelling. Harris, who didn’t know Thorpe was a police officer, got into a physical altercation resulting in Harris getting clubbed in the head. He responded by stabbing Thorpe three times in the stomach. Thorpe died the next day.

Subsequent vigils for the fallen officer resulted in the culmination of the racial tension and after another altercation brewed and a gun was pulled, riots ensued. There were somehow no fatalities in this riot, but there were multiple reports of police brutality. No police offers were charged and Harris was sent to prison at Sing-Sing, where he later died.