Connections: Shatter the Silence
Louise W. Knight, a historian who is the author of two books on Jane Addams — the 19th-century activist and founder of one of the country’s first settlement houses, in Chicago — keeps in touch with my husband, whom she has known for many years. After the heinous massacre in Orlando this week, she sent him an email in which she took issue with the media’s calling it “the worst mass killing” in United States history. She made the point that what happened in Orlando can be called the “worst mass shooting” in United States history only if the deaths of hundreds of African-Americans in 1917 in East St. Louis, Mo., is categorized as a race riot. (She also wrote to The New York Times and The A.P.)
Between 10,000 and 12,000 black Southerners were drawn to East St. Louis in 1916 and 1917 to find work in wartime industries, as part of what is known as the Great Migration. On July 2, 1917, the city of East St. Louis exploded in the worst racial rioting the country had ever seen. The violence went on for almost a week and included drive-by shootings, beatings, and arson. Nine whites and hundreds of African-Americans were killed, although the actual number has not been recorded. The country had already witnessed the deaths of countless others in race riots, including the one in 1908 in Springfield, Ill. (where Abraham Lincoln lived for many years), that resulted in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P.
Riots caused by groups of rampaging armed men are different in kind from a mass shooting by a single person, certainly, whether that lone killer is motivated by politics, bigotry, lunacy, or some volatile combination of all three. For Ms. Knight, the difference lies in the availability of assault-type rifles, which fire many rounds of ammunition accurately in a relatively short time, and which were the weapons of choice in the murders in San Bernadino, Calif., Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. At first, reports said that an AR-15 had been used in Orlando; later, that report was corrected to say it had been a Sig Sauer MCX Rifle, invented for the use of Special Forces, and apparently loaded with bullets that shoot more quietly than an AR-15. But what difference do these details make? Isn’t it an obscenity that the American public has to be conversant in such matters?
Every single person in American public life has expressed sorrow about the horrendous deaths of 49 innocent people last weekend, to the point that we all started remarking that words, finally, seem to have failed us.
Perhaps this time, however, words will lead to action.
Representative Jim Hines of Connecticut may have been the first member of Congress to say he would not take part in a moment of silence on the House of Representatives floor on behalf of the Orlando dead because these pious moments have become an “excuse for Congress not to take any real action to address gun violence.” Connecticut’s senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are vocal gun-control advocates; like Mr. Hines, they represent Newtown, where 20 children and 6 adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Senator Murphy unequivocally blamed Congress for the latest massacre: “Congress has become complicit in these murders by its total, unconscionable, deafening silence. This doesn’t have to happen, but this epidemic will continue without end if Congress continues to sit on its hands and do nothing — again.”