A race riot or racial riot is an outbreak of violent civil disorder (i.e. a riot) in which race is a key factor. A phenomenon frequently confused with the concept of 'race riot' is sectarian violence, which involves public mass violence or conflict over non-racial factors.

The term had entered the English language in the United States by the 1890s.^{[citation needed]} Until 1968 the use of the term in the United States referred to race riots which were often violence by racial groups against people of other races.^{[citation needed]} In the late 1960s the term race riots came to describe riots involving large numbers of members of racial minority groups.^{[citation needed]} Physical aggression was often aimed at their neighborhood businesses, government representatives and law enforcement agencies perceived as unfairly targeting racial groups.

According to the 1968 Kerner Commission report, the race riots in the United States in the 1960s usually took place in the context of underlying grievances of a minority racial group (in this case, African Americans). Often there was an inciting incident in which a member of the minority racial group was injured or killed, and that incident was widely perceived in the community to be unjust.^{[citation needed]}

Bobby Lee Rush (born November 23, 1946) is the U.S. Representative for Illinois's 1st congressional district, serving since 1993. He is a member of the Democratic Party.

The district is located principally on the South Side of Chicago. It is a minority-majority district and has a higher percentage of African Americans (65%) than any other congressional district in the nation. Rush has the distinction of being the only person to defeat President Barack Obama in an election for public office, when Obama challenged him in a primary election in 2000. Rush is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

After dropping out of high school, Rush joined the U.S. Army in 1963 but went AWOL and yet, somehow received an honorable discharge in 1968. Throughout the 1960s Rush was involved in the civil-rights movement. He worked in civil-disobedience campaigns in the South, and co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968 and was made its "defense minister". His son, Huey, was named after Panther leader Huey Newton. "We were reacting to police brutality, to the historical relationship between African-Americans and recalcitrant racist whites," Rush later told People magazine. "We needed to arm ourselves." Rush was present when fellow Black Panther Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid and later made an official statement that the police, referred only to as "pigs" by Rush, had murdered Hampton. Rush's own apartment was raided in December 1969 where police discovered an unregistered pistol, rifle, shotgun and pistol ammunition, training manuals on explosives and booby traps, a small amount of marijuana and an assortment of communist literature. Earlier that same year Rush stated the philosophy behind his membership in the Black Panthers saying, "Black people have been on the defensive for all these years. The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure."

The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman took place on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States. Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old African American male who was unarmed. George Zimmerman was a 28-year-old multi-racial Hispanic American, who was the community watch coordinator for the gated community where the shooting took place.

While on a private errand, Zimmerman saw Martin walking inside the gated community where Martin and his father were visiting his father's fiancée. Zimmerman called the Sanford Police Department to report Martin's behavior as suspicious. Shortly afterwards, there was an altercation, which ended with Zimmerman fatally shooting Martin once in the chest at close range.

When police arrived on the scene Zimmerman told them that Martin had attacked him and that he had shot Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose and two vertical lacerations on the back of his head.EMTs treated Zimmerman at the scene, after which he was taken to the Sanford Police Department. Zimmerman was detained and questioned for approximately five hours. A statement was videotaped, and he was then released without being charged. Police said that they had not found evidence to contradict his assertion of self-defense.

Boyd Blake Rice (born December 16, 1956) is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard magazine.

Rice became widely known through his involvement in V. Vale's RE/Search books. He is profiled in RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook and Pranks!. In Pranks, Rice described his experience in 1976 when he tried to give President Ford's wife, Betty Ford, a skinned sheep's head on a silver platter. In this interview, he emphasized the consensus nature of reality and the havoc that can be wreaked by refusing to play by the collective rules that dictate most people's perception of the external world.

In the mid-1980s Rice became close friends with Anton LaVey, founder and High Priest of the Church of Satan, and was made a Priest, then later a Magister in the Council of Nine of the Church. The two admired much of the same music and shared a similar misanthropic outlook. Each had been inspired by Might is Right in fashioning various works: LaVey in his seminal Satanic Bible and Rice in several recordings.