Three nights against Black Philadelphia
11 - 14 August 1834Moyamensing and the blocks south of South Street, Philadelphia County, PA
A white mob attacked Black Moyamensing for three nights in August 1834, wrecking more than thirty homes and sacking the First African Presbyterian Church. Forty-odd arrests followed and almost nothing else.
Philadelphia in 1834 held the largest free Black population of any city in the United States, and a Black institutional life - churches, schools, benefit societies, an abolition movement - that existed nowhere else at that scale. It also held a white working class, much of it Irish and newly arrived, competing for the same wharf and cellar work, and a civic order that had never decided those two facts had to be reconciled.
The violence started on 11 August 1834 at a carousel near Seventh and South Streets, in a dispute over who could ride and sit where. It became three nights of organised destruction. Mobs moved into Moyamensing, the district just south of South Street where much of Black Philadelphia lived, and worked through it: taverns, houses, furniture dragged into the street and broken. They sacked the First African Presbyterian Church. More than thirty Black homes were destroyed.
The constabulary of 1834 was a night watch, not a police force, and it was not equal to a riot even where it was willing. The violence subsided on 14 August. Fewer than twenty people were arrested at first and more than forty in all, out of a mob that ran to several hundred. How many died is contested: the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia's account records no deaths, while John Runcie's study of the riot - the fullest scholarly treatment of it - records two Black men killed and two churches damaged rather than one. That a city could not later agree on whether anyone had died is itself a fact about how seriously it treated the question.
What followed was worse than the riot. The attacks of 1834 were the first of a series - Pennsylvania Hall, built by abolitionists, was burned by a crowd of nearly three thousand in May 1838 while firemen stood and watched; a Black temperance parade in August 1842 brought a mob that torched an abolitionist hall and the Second African Presbyterian Church. In 1838 Pennsylvania rewrote its constitution to strike the vote from Black men who had held it. The city that had the country's largest free Black community spent a decade teaching it that neither its property nor its churches nor its franchise was secure.
More than thirty Black homes destroyed and a church sacked. The shape covers Moyamensing and the blocks around Seventh and South Streets where the attacks ran; it is drawn indicatively, and the district's 1834 boundaries are not the modern ones.
Sources
- Riots (1830s and 1840s)Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, Rutgers-Camdenphiladelphiaencyclopedia.orgPatrick Grubbs. Backs the 11-14 August dates, the carousel dispute at Seventh and South, the sacking of the First African Presbyterian Church, more than thirty homes destroyed, and the arrest figures.
- “Hunting the Nigs” in Philadelphia: The Race Riot of August 1834Pennsylvania History, Pennsylvania Historical Association (1972)John Runcie, volume 39, pages 187-218. The fullest scholarly account of the three nights; its tallies of deaths, homes and churches differ from the encyclopedia's, which is why both are cited here.
- Pennsylvania Hall Fire (1838)BlackPastblackpast.orgBacks only the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall described at the end of this entry, not the 1834 riot itself.