The 1829 Riots and the Wilberforce Colony

In the summer of eighteen twenty-nine, Cincinnati's white residents gave the city's Black population thirty days to leave. The Ohio Black Codes required free Black people to post a five-hundred-dollar bond to guarantee their good behavior, a law rarely enforced but always available. When it was suddenly invoked in June, Black community leaders negotiated with Canadian authorities and sent two agents north to purchase land in Upper Canada.

Before the thirty days were up, the mobs came anyway.

Starting August seventeenth, white crowds estimated at two to three hundred men, many of them Irish dock workers competing with Black laborers for river-trade jobs, moved through the waterfront neighborhood called Little Africa. They burned shelters, destroyed property, and attacked residents. The violence lasted nearly a week. When it was over, more than half of Cincinnati's Black population had fled, perhaps twelve hundred people.

A number of families emigrated to Upper Canada and founded the Wilberforce Colony in what is now Ontario. Back in the United States, the emergency in Cincinnati directly triggered a national response. In September eighteen thirty, the first National Negro Convention met in Philadelphia, bringing together free Black leaders from across the country to discuss mutual protection and political strategy. The Cincinnati riots are where that movement began.

Those who stayed in Cincinnati rebuilt. A Black community newspaper appeared. Churches and schools opened. And then, in eighteen thirty-six, white mobs attacked again. In eighteen forty-one, they attacked a third time. By the third riot, Cincinnati's Black community was better organized and fought back.

The city's Black population did not leave because the violence drove them away. They stayed because Cincinnati, despite everything, sat on the free side of the river.