Given the recent unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Black Then felt it fitting to publish a list of American race riots that resulted in terrible loss of life. These aren’t necessarily the ten deadliest riots, but they represent a cross-section of American history — the history of a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

8. The Battle of Hayes Pond (1958)

In 1956, the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina achieved official recognition, and this infuriated a local Ku Klux Klan leader, James Cole. Within a year, Cole, who also fancied himself a preacher, was denouncing the Lumbee Indians as half-breeds with African origins. Crosses were burned on Lumbee lawns in an effort to scare the Lumbee citizens into silence, but it didn’t work.

Cole planned a rally on a path of secluded farmland on the night of January 18, 1958. The local sheriff warned him to stay away for his own safety, but about 50 to 100 armed Klansmen arrived for the purpose of burning a cross. Before Cole could begin denouncing the Lumbee, 500 Lumbee Indians showed up with their own firearms and shot out the Klan’s spotlight, plunging the whole area into pitch darkness. They then began shouting and firing their weapons into the air. The Klansmen fled the scene, with four being wounded. Cole left his own wife behind and waded through a swamp to get away. He was subsequently prosecuted and served two years in prison for inciting a riot.

7. The Ferguson Riots (2014)

While protests have taken place in cities across the nation, they’re centered on the aftermath of a police shooting that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Much information and misinformation has circulated regarding the nature of the shooting, and whether Michael Brown had his hands up and was surrendering or whether he was charging Sgt. Darren Wilson. All that’s agreed on is that Brown had just shoplifted cigars from a convenience store and was obstructing traffic when Sgt. Wilson confronted him and a friend.

But the entire Ferguson area had been a racial tinderbox for years, and when eyewitnesses reported that Brown was unarmed and shot dead from behind, the city exploded in protest. Most of it took the form of peaceful marching and civilly disobedient rallies, but there was also widespread looting, vandalism and arson in the neighborhoods around Brown’s family’s home.

Then, on November 24, the Ferguson grand jury concluded that no charges should be filed against Sgt. Wilson. Within minutes, Ferguson erupted a second time. This outbreak of violence was worse, with 12 buildings and two police cars set on fire. Firefighters couldn’t respond to some cases because they began taking gunfire from rioters. The store Michael Brown had robbed before his encounter with Wilson was vandalized and looted in apparent retaliation against the verdict. Protests and small-scale riots broke out elsewhere across the nation as well — a total of 205 people have been arrested as of November 30, 2014.

6. The Wilmington Insurrection (1898)

North Carolina had long been a hotbed of racial unrest. In 1898, only 35 years after blacks got the right to vote, many of the whites in the area openly hated them and did not choose their words carefully when expressing this. The Republican Party was biracial, but the Democratic Party ran an 1898 campaign of regaining white supremacy. The Democrats regained control of the state legislature, and the some whites in Wilmington formed a group of 25 who demanded that Alexander Manly, a black newspaper owner, be forced to shut down and leave. Manly refused, whereupon Alfred Waddell, a white supremacist and Congressman who had just been unseated, organized a group of 2,000 armed white Spanish-American War veterans who marched to the newspaper office. They destroyed the printing equipment and burned the building to the ground.

Waddell intended to disband the group, as the job was done and Manly had gone into hiding. But the mob quickly turned anarchic, and began hunting down and attacking blacks all over the city. Violence continued for several days. Death estimates range from six to 100, all blacks, with the wide range due to the incomplete records of the hospitals. Many blacks fled the city and hid in the swamps, while others left the area permanently. Waddell was subsequently “elected” mayor, essentially as a result of a coup d’etat.

5. The Detroit Race Riot (1943)

This riot had been brewing for years in an area with a history of discrimination against blacks. When automobile factories, which were working at maximum speed and capacity because of the war, began hiring blacks to work alongside whites on the factory floors, the white workers responded by walking off the job. During a pro-white rally in June 1943, about three weeks before the riot, a voice was heard over a loudspeaker saying, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a nigger!”

The riot began with a fistfight between a white sailor and a black man who was thought to have insulted the sailor’s girlfriend. Other fights had already broke out, but this was the tipping point that turned into a community-wide brawl. False rumors went up that white men had thrown a black mother and baby into the river, and that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman. The rioting lasted for three days, peaking as masses of angry whites beat up black motorists and pedestrians, and angry blacks responding in kind. 34 people were killed, 433 were injured and $2 million worth of property was damaged. The riots didn’t abate until Franklin Roosevelt sent Federal troops into the city.

4. The Watts Riots (1965)

This period of unrest in Los Angeles was preceded by years of racial tension. The city had become a powder keg, and the riot began with a traffic stop on August 11. A 21 year-old black man named Marquette Frye was pulled over for reckless driving and was given a field sobriety test. His brother and passenger, Ronald, walked to their nearby home and brought back their mother, Lena Price, who began to lecture her son for drunk driving. What happened next is unclear, but an altercation began between all three black people and the white police officers, with Price jumping on one of the officers and an officer pulling out a shotgun. No shots were fired, but all three civilians were arrested and a false rumor began that the police had kicked a pregnant woman.