Race riots in Cardiff and Liverpool leave three dead
Cardiff, 14 June 1919 - Three men have been killed and many more injured, in the course of racial rioting in England and Wales.
The violence experienced in Cardiff and Liverpool was extreme and involved the use of revolvers, razors, knives and bottles.
In Cardiff, earlier this week, a white man named Harold Smart, 20, was found with his throat slashed with a razor. Fighting in the city lasted for several hours and a large force of additional police was drafted to quell the unrest.
Six Arab men were arrested and charged with firing revolvers in the course of the disturbance and all along the Bute Road district broken glass and boarded windows bear testament to what one newspaper has described as a night of ‘guerilla warfare’.
On Homfray Street, meanwhile, an Arab lodging house was burned out: a white male set fire to it after dragging two black men and their white landlady onto the street.
Opposite the now derelict house is the boarded former residence of a Somali priest, who was forced to flee when a mob attacked. The attack followed a disturbance during which a black man, who is alleged to have threatened a white woman, took refuge in a house in the Somali quarter of the city.
When the house was attacked by a mob, the occupants, in a state of panic, retaliated by shooting out from the house. John Donovan, a recently discharged soldier, was shot through the heart and died almost immediately.
The scenes in Cardiff bear an ugly echo of those witnessed in Liverpool where white men are reported to have attacked black men in the Mill Street area, a ‘foreign quarter of the city’.
In one instance, a black man in police custody, was taken from the police by a white mob and thrown into the docks, where he drowned.
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
