This is a one-page proposal for a longer conference paper on print culture, as it relates to the 1863 Detroit race riot. It proposes an examination of strategies of racial definition in the anonymously authored "Thrilling Narrative" of the riot, focusing on three separate issues: the racial status of Thomas Faulkner (the ostensible cause of the riot), the strategy of transcribed eyewitness testimony and journalistic accounts, and the final inclusion of a poem identified as having been written by a "colored man". The complex politics of race in the North, during the Civil War, are implicit in these different strategies--and to some extent the author's refusal to identify himself (or herself) is necessitated by these complexities.
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 local newspapers, which had long been engaged in racially-charged rhetoric before the actual episode that prompted the riots.
Newspapers, however, are printed in black and white. 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 would be a Democratic voter in a free state. But it is worth considering that -- in the absence of textual illustration -- Faulkner's contested racial status can only be constructed by words. Meanwhile the firsthand testimony is offset by a series of articles either identified as published in a newspaper (The Detroit and Advertiser Tribune), or having been "communicated" (i.e., submitted but presumably never published) to the same newspaper -- when this paper was identifiable at the time as a Republican Party organ.
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