guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments. Through violent economic tactics and legal technicalities, were gradually removed from the voting process. Lynching era and race riots (1878–1939) Lynching, is defined as “a form of violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without a trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation on him or her.” It was a particularly ritualistic form of murder, and it frequently involved the majority of the members of the local white community. Lynchings were sometimes announced in advance and they were frequently turned into spectacle lynchings which audiences could witness. The number of lynchings in the United States dropped from the 1880s to the 1920s, but there were still an average of about 30 lynchings per year during the 1920s. A study of 100 lynchings which was conducted from 1929 to 1940 revealed that at least one third of the victims were innocent of the crimes of which they were accused. Labor and immigrant conflicts were sources of tensions that served as catalysts for the East St. Louis riot of 1917. White rioters killed an between 39 and 150 Black residents of East St. Louis, after Black residents had killed two white policemen, mistaking the car which they were riding in for another car which was full of white occupants who previously drove through a Black neighborhood and randomly fired their guns into a crowd of Black people. Other White-on-Black race riots included the Atlanta riots (1906), the Omaha and Chicago riots (1919), some of a series of riots which occurred in the volatile post-World War I environment, and the Tulsa massacre (1921). The Chicago race riot of 1919 grew out of tensions which existed on the Southside, where Irish Americans and Black residents were crowded into substandard housing and competed with each other for jobs at the stockyards. The Irish Americans had lived in the city for a longer period of time, and they also organized themselves around athletic and political clubs. Violence broke out across the city in late July. White mobs, many of which were organized around Irish athletic clubs, pulled black people off trolley cars, attacked Black businesses, and beat victims. City officials closed the street car system, but the rioting continued. A total of 23 Black people and 15 white people were killed. The 1921 Tulsa race massacre took place in Greenwood,