Talk:Omaha race riot of 1919

Untitled
For a March 2005 deletion debate over this page see Votes for deletion/Omaha Riot

Moved
I moved this article to a more specific title and am in the process of cleaning it up. Equinox137 00:57, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't make sense
"Including the crisis caused by President Woodrow Wilson's having been incapacitated by a stroke. (Requests by the governor for National Guard assistance had to go to the President's office.)" Doesn't make sense - I read it first that Wilson had been drunk? A stroke? Including what crisis? This is in the section of newspapers, which also doesn't make sense. I am wary of cleaning it up because I am unsure of what it is supposed to be saying. Can someone else who has knowledge of the event? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.54.214.193 (talk) 17:23, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

NPOV?
This article does not seem to be very neutral. Most of it is seems to have been copied from somewhere which tried to make the event sound as dramatic as possible. For NPOV look at :"Witnesses say the boy was the most intrepid of the mob's leaders." The lack of sources is somewhat worrying as well. --Hydraton31 21:11, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. It does seem like a copy and paste job with little to no citations, and rather overly-dramatic language for an encyclopedia article ("The mob in the street shrieked its delight at the last message." being another example of this). I've put a cleanup tag on it. -- Grandpafootsoldier 08:25, 30 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with concerns about POV. While the riot was horrific, I don't think an encyclopedia article should be repeating the dramatic tone of a newspaper article with a blow-by-blow account of every awful detail. Let readers go to primary sources for that. It may be useful for the author to look at other examples, or to get some distance from the contemporary articles, and try to identify what happened more dispassionately with less emotional language.  What were some of the common parts of lynchings? (Sorry, but it's true, lynchings and riots are a kind of community control. They take place in other countries as well, even if the perpetrators and victims vary.


 * So what was going on here? I think it would be more appropriate to identify police mistakes and background issues, than having such detail about the playing out of the riot. For example, it appears there were ethnic tensions because of increased immigration, competition for jobs and housing, rumors of inappropriate behavior, crossing of boundaries (it sounds as if Coe/Brown may have been picked up because he lived with a white woman), incitement by Dennison and others, intemperate young male leaders going to extremes, and mostly male participants - so what does that tell you about the larger message? Rioting was both a crowd out of control and a way for disaffected men to regain dominance where they felt they were losing it.  Crowds are very dangerous and emotionally volatile.  Having them led by adolescent males certainly could increase the volatility.
 * Some of the article is unclear - near the end is the author suggesting that Dennison sent guys out in blackface to assail white women in the weeks before the riot, and then tried to accuse the administration of not doing enough to protect white women? These 3 paragraphs are all mine. --Parkwells 20:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I definitely agree -- far too dramatic. It reads like a narrative. 71.194.163.223 22:20, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Much of it was borrowed from a (public domain) pamphlet published in 1919. Durova Charge! 11:52, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


 * So, are there no other existing secondary sources we can use in citing this riot? Admittedly, the melodramatic movie-script version of events depicted here, years after everyone else has seemingly noted the incredibly biased and dramatically worded narrative, still stands and is completely unbearable to read in its every phrasing; I don't see any cleanup labels for it. Woolfy123 (talk) 19:16, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I've at least finished rewriting the entirety of the "Background" section, but the rest of the narrative desperately needs the overhaul, too.Woolfy123 (talk) 19:40, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

It is completely unacceptable that the unsourced, PoV content in this article can have existed for 15 years, despite many calls for it to be wikified. I'm posting notice that as of one month from today (25 Feb. 2019), if the content from "Beginning" through the penultimate sentence of "Lynching" -- none of which contains a single citation -- has not been wikified, I will remove it in its entirety. It does more harm to present unsourced PoV claims on WP than to present no information at all. Bricology (talk) 23:47, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Why not just quote the biased account and let it go at that, as some biased contemporary coverage? Dicklyon (talk) 05:24, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

20th century Play
It's not clear what the objection was to the way the play was performed - whether it was about using characters in "blackface", with those associations (which should be clarified); creating fictional characters instead of having actors appear to play historical characters; using white actors to play certain parts in which the historical people were African American. After noting both objections and then later widespread performances of the play, the editor doesn't tell how the play was received when performed in Long Branch, NJ.--Parkwells 20:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Copyright concerns
This article has several times been flagged as a copyright violation, presumably due to its duplication of. Please note that the source itself notes that the material was from a pamphlet published in 1919. This material is no longer copyrighted, but public domain in the United States. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
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External links modified
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NPOV Redux
(Without further comment, I have moved this comment from the "NPOV" section created in 2007 into its own section. Fabrickator (talk) 06:35, 4 March 2023 (UTC))

As a reader, I found the POV on this appalling. And it's been a problem for over 15 years? Four years after the last time it was mentioned? I don't know how to edit Wikipedia, but putting the contemporary source into quotation marks and citing seems to be better than leaving it like this. But also, this is an important article. The history of mass actions against outsiders, unfairly accused of being sexual predators, as a means for corrupt power brokers and disenfranchised young white men to exercise community and political control--it seems really relevant to 2023 America. So maybe we can stop making the lynch mob sound like the protagonist? 2601:2C2:4300:3750:5007:5C5A:B7EA:8F63 (talk) 06:04, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Overly narrative style without citations
Whole sections of this - for example, ‘The First Hanging’ - seem excessively narrative rather than encyclopaedic in style, and do not have citations, which renders them overall suspect. Could these be supported? 2603:7000:2BF0:9740:8CA5:11E7:8FE3:C314 (talk) 23:22, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

digitized version of pamphlet
I suggest that we incorporate the following "digitized version" of Omaha's riot in story and picture (in place of or in addition to) the existing link. Thoughts? Fabrickator (talk) 20:39, 2 April 2024 (UTC)