Beaumont race riot of 1943

The 1943 race riot in Beaumont, Texas, erupted on June 15 and ended two days later. It related to wartime tensions in the overcrowded city, which had been flooded by workers from across the South. The immediate catalyst to white workers from the Pennsylvania Shipyard in Beaumont attacking black people and their property was a rumor that a white woman had been raped by a black man. This was one of several riots in the summer of 1943 in which black people suffered as victims and had the greatest losses in property damage. The first took place in the largest shipyard in Mobile, Alabama in late May; others took place in Detroit and Harlem in August. They were related to social competition and tensions arising from the wartime build-up. Some cities were struggling to accommodate the influx of black and white defense workers, dealing with shortages in housing and strained services.

Beaumont had become a destination for tens of thousands of workers in the defense industry; from 1940 to 1943 the city had grown from 59,000 to 80,000 persons, with African Americans maintaining a proportion of roughly one third of the total. Workers were attracted to the buildup of high-paying jobs in the defense industry, concentrated at the shipyard, as Beaumont was located on the Neches River northeast of Houston on the Gulf Coast. A presidential Executive Order 8802 was issued to prohibit racial and religious discrimination among defense contractors, and African Americans sought a share of opportunities in the high-paying jobs. New residents in Beaumont competed for jobs and housing in the crowded town, where whites had imposed segregated facilities, as was common across the South.