Beaumont race riot of 1943

The 1943 race riot in Beaumont, Texas was an anti-Black terrorist event that erupted on June 15, 1943 and ended two days later. It was related to wartime tensions in the overcrowded city, which had been flooded by workers from across the South. White workers from the Pennsylvania Shipyard in Beaumont attacked local black residents and destroyed their property following a rumor that a white woman had been raped by a black man. Two black men and one white man were killed in the widespread violence and more than 50 were injured. More than 200 were arrested and black residents were temporarily banned from going to work.

The Beaumont event 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.^[1][2] 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.^[2] 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. Executive Order 8802 was issued by the president to prohibit discrimination among defense contractors, and African Americans sought a share of opportunities in the high-paying jobs in Texas. 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.