Луисвильдегі 1855 жылғы иммигранттарға қарсы қырғын

1855 anti immigrant riot in Louisville, KY

Bloody Monday was a series of riots on August 6, 1855, in Louisville, Kentucky, an election day, when Protestant mobs attacked Irish and German Catholic neighborhoods. These riots grew out of the bitter rivalry between the Democrats and the Nativist Know Nothing Party. Multiple street fights raged, leaving twenty two people dead, scores injured, and much property destroyed by fire. Five people were later indicted, but none were convicted, and the victims were not compensated.

Bloody Monday was sparked by the Know Nothing political party (officially known as the American Party), fed in large part by the radical, inflammatory anti immigrant writings, especially those of the editor of the Louisville Journal, George D. Prentice. Irish and Germans were recent arrivals and now comprised a third of the city's population. Like other major cities on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Louisville grew rapidly in the previous two decades because of heavy immigration from Ireland and Germany. There were 11,000 immigrants out of a white population of 36,000. Most were Roman Catholics, but there was also a large German Lutheran element. The vast majority were Democrats.

According to the Louisville Daily Journal by Monday morning the city was " in possession of an armed mob, the base passions of which were infuriated to the highest pitch by the incendiary appeals of the newspaper organ and the popular leaders of the Know Nothing party." The Know Nothings formed armed groups to guard the polls on election day. Hundreds were deterred from voting by direct acts of intimidation, others through fear of consequences. In the Sixth Ward William Thomasson, a former Congressman from the district, while appealing to the maddened crowd to cease their acts of disorder and violence was struck from behind and beaten. In the afternoon a general row occurred on Shelby street, extending from Main to Broadway. Some fourteen or fifteen men were shot, including Officer Williams, Joe Selvage and others. Two or three were killed, and a number of houses, chiefly German coffee houses, broken into and pillaged. About 4 o'clock, a vast crowd armed with shotguns, muskets and rifles were proceeding to attack the new German parish of St. Martin of Tours on Shelby street. Mayor Barbee, himself a Know Nothing, assuaged them and the mob returned to the First Ward polls. An hour afterwards the large brewery on Jefferson street, near the junction of Green, was set on fire. By the time it was over, more than 100 businesses, private homes and tenements had been vandalized, looted and/or burned, including a block long row of houses known as Quinn's Row. Historians estimate the death toll at 19–22, while Catholics (including Bishop Martin John Spalding of Louisville) set the death toll at well over 100, with entire families consumed in the fires. Weapons, arms and later bodies of the dead, were stored in Louisville Metro Hall (the old Jefferson County Courthouse, now the Mayor's Office), a Know Nothing stronghold at the time. Sporadic violence and attacks had occurred in the year and months leading up to August 6, continuing for some time afterward. No one was ever prosecuted in connection with the riots. A series of commemorations was held to mark the 150th anniversary of Bloody Monday. According to one of the organizers, Vicky Ullrich, whose German speaking Swiss ancestors fled to Indiana, " with another influx of immigrants increasing the diversity of Louisville, it's important that Bloody Monday be remembered so that a similar event does not happen again." which was the site of a small commemoration on March 17, 2015.