I have never rioted but I was an eyewitness to the Greekfest riots in Virginia Beach in 1989. It was scary. The police, almost all white, inflamed the situation and made things much worse. Miraculously, nobody died, and the businesses that were damaged mostly had insurance and were able to rebuild for the next season. It also helped that the Democratic nominee for Governor, who was black, and the head of the Virginia NAACP, also black, didn’t escalate the rhetoric. (I happened to run into the NAACP head a few weeks later; he was very interested in hearing a first hand account from a white bystander. I thanked him for his attempts to de-escalate. He wanted to know whether I had seen any KKK activity because he had heard reports that there had been some; I told him that I had not seen any.) The Republican nominee for Governor did escalate, and he lost the general election that fall. There were no additional riots.
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