Racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska
Racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska occurred mostly because of the city's volatile mixture of high numbers of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and African-American migrants from the Deep South.
There was competition among ethnic Irish, newer European immigrants, and African-American migrants from the South, for industrial jobs and housing.
In Omaha as in other major cities, racial tension has erupted at times of social and economic strife, often taking the form of mob violence as different groups tried to assert power.
Most violence and civil unrest in the 1960s, by contrast, arose out of poverty and problems caused by massive loss of working-class jobs through industrial restructuring.
[7] In the early 20th century, social tensions of the rapidly industrializing city absorbing waves of new immigrants and migrants broke out in riots between ethnic minorities.
The industry responded by hiring workers from other parts of the country who were also seeking work: both European immigrants and black migrants from the South (whose numbers doubled in Omaha from 1910 to 1920).
In September 1909 a male resident of the Greek community was arrested by an ethnic Irish South Omaha policeman for allegedly having a relationship with a white woman.
[10] In September 1919, following a summer of racial riots in several other industrial cities, an African-American laborer named Willy Brown was lynched in Omaha.
On July 4, 1910, African American boxer Jack Johnson won a major upset at a national match in Reno, Nevada.
[11] After World War I, white veterans trying to return to their civilian jobs found African-Americans and Eastern European immigrants in their former positions.
Their resentment led to several violent strikes in the South Omaha meat packing industry as groups tried to control access to jobs.
In the next election, "Cowboy" Jim Dahlman was returned to office with the support of Tom Dennison, the informal leader of the vice world.
She recounted her activist efforts to desegregate a middle-class West Omaha neighborhood for an African-American surgeon and his family who wanted to live in the area.
Leaders in the community criticized the Omaha World-Herald and local television stations for blaming African Americans for the conditions they faced in their deteriorating neighborhoods, when the problems of joblessness and decreased maintenance were beyond city and regional control.
In March 1968, a crowd of high school and university students gathered at the Omaha Civic Auditorium to protest the presidential campaign of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama.
[24] The following day a local barber named Ernie Chambers helped calm a disturbance and prevent a riot by students at Horace Mann Junior High School.
An African-American teenager named Vivian Strong was shot and killed by police officers in an incident at the Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects in June 1969.
In 1970, an African-American man named Duane Peak was arrested, and quickly implicated six others in a bombing at a vacant house in North Omaha that killed a police officer.
On August 31, local Black Panther Party leaders David Rice and Ed Poindexter were arrested in the case, despite not having been originally implicated.
In 1971, both men were convicted of murder in the controversial Rice/Poindexter Case, and in 1974 a retrial of Rice and Poindexter was denied by the Nebraska State Supreme Court.
The city responded by equipping every police car with a camera and giving North Omaha officers body armor.
[30] That same year, the Omaha World-Herald reported that, "One resident of Rose Garden Estates near 172nd and Pacific Streets said privately, for instance, that he finds the prospect of being incorporated into the city 'increasingly scary.'
The man, an insurance company employee, denied that his problems were based on race, but he asked that this part of the interview be anonymous.
[34] The Omaha Police Department does not make a decision on the use of force because Jared Kruse refused to be questioned and is allowed to retire a year later for PTSD.
Some used this action to target long-time State Senator Ernie Chambers, an African American who had then served 27 years representing North Omaha.
Like some other districts such as Louisville, Kentucky, Omaha has begun to explore socioeconomic integration - assigning students according to family income - to change the makeup of their schools and address low test scores among poor children in the inner city.
Chambers defended his decision from the standpoint that much of the city had residential segregation and that his plan would provide African American parents in North Omaha with more control over their district.
[45] In February 2007, unknown assailants robbed, firebombed, and spray painted a racist epithet on the side of an East Omaha grocery store owned by an Ethiopian immigrant.
[50] In May and June 2020, thousands of demonstrators filled Omaha streets to protest the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and other killings marked by the Black Lives Matter movement.
[51][52] A white bar owner in the Old Market, Jacob Gardner, shot and killed unarmed Black protester James Scurlock.
