What are race riots?

Race riots are violent conflicts resulting from animosity or tension between different racial or ethnic groups. Race riots have taken place in America since the early days of multi-ethnic immigration and are both a historic and on-going phenomenon in American society. Fights between Protestants and recently-arrived Catholic immigrants in the 18th and early 19th centuries gave way to race riots targeting African American communities, particularly in the wake of emancipation (1863). New York City’s 1863 Draft Riot, while initially designed to protest the draft, quickly became a race riot in which Irish Americans targeted African Americans throughout the city. The riot became one of the largest racial insurrections in US history, requiring President Lincoln to divert several regiments to restore order to the city after the Battle of Gettysburg. Race riots continued in the aftermath of the Reconstruction era as white Americans sought to uphold the color line well into the 20th century. In the 1900s, the Red Summer of 1919, resulting from a variety of postwar tensions, came to describe a series of race riots in more than thirty cities throughout the United States (particularly Chicago, Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas) that resulted in the death of hundreds, only to be outmatched by the riots that accompanied the nearly two-decade struggle of the Civil Rights Movement. Race riots since the 1970s have often transcended the black-white binary common to American race relations, including Latinx and Asian American communities as well as African American ones. Some historians and commentators consider the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, which became violent when white nationalist protestors clashed with counter-protesters, to be America’s most recent race riot.
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/chicago-race-riot-of-1919