Hard to Believe It's Been 25 Years Since the Hobo Day Riots

It's hard to believe that it has been 25 years. The date was October 20, 1990. What started as a homecoming celebration at South Dakota State University in Brookings, South Dakota, quickly turned into hundreds of rioters vandalizing and starting fires, marking what many South Dakotans know as the Hobo Day Riots.

The Hobo Day homecoming tradition has been a memorable part of South Dakota State University for over a century. But the 1990 Hobo Day celebration will stick in the minds of South Dakotans and Jackrabbit fans, and will be labeled as "unforgettable."

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Along with a crackdown of alcohol in the dorms and spurred by a Jackrabbit football team that lost to Augustana, 31-0, a usually quiet city and campus began to unwind. Mobs of rioters shut down 9th Avenue, starting fires fueled by anything that would burn including mattresses, picnic tables and even a dog house. Flames that reached the height of two stories danced into the night sky.

As an estimated 1,000 students rioted, Brookings' police and police from surrounding communities, tried to calm the events so firefighters could extinguish the flames.

The Hobo Day riots may have left a black smudge on the reputation of a school that is normally calm, but many say that the rioters weren't even students of SDSU and that the event wasn't as bad as the news media made it look.

Go back 25 years and watch the SDSU Hobo Day Riot of 1990.