Print Culture and the 1863 Detroit Riot
Proposal for a Paper: Print Culture in Black and White: Rhetorical Strategies of Racial Identification in a Thrilling Narrative, from the Lips of the Sufferers of the Late Detroit Riot, March 6, 1863.
The race riot that occurred in March 1863 in Detroit would have lasting consequences for the city -- among them, it occasioned the foundation of Detroit's first permanent police department. But the question of to what degree the riot began as a race riot is still left open: there is some reason to believe that, like the Civil War draft riots in New York City and elsewhere, it may have begun as a less racially-motivated episode of mob violence that settled upon Detroit's black community as its ultimate target. Historians of the episode all agree, however, that the climate which permitted the riot had been established by Detroit's...
Yet the race of the author of A Thrilling Narrative is never identified. Instead, the text exhibits a series of strategies of racial identification. Its identification of Thomas Faulkner, the man whose
trial and
sentencing (for the
sexual assault of two young women) had occasioned the riot. Faulkner's race was contested by newspapers at the time -- some defined him as "negro" but the Thrilling Narrative insists that Faulkner was "to all intents a white man," going beyond to identify him not by racial but by political valence: "he voted the Democratic ticket." In this strategy, race is intended to be identified with the larger politics of race -- in 1863, no "authentic" black man…
