...Night of Rage was when the Sears Tower was brought down by Alamos 2000 which ceated the Shattergraves.
Actually, that happened a few days after the Night of Rage, although it's easy to lump it together as riots were still going on when Alamos destroyed the Sears Tower. After that happened, Sirrug took down that airliner in retaliation. I think that took place a few days after the tower went down, but I can't recall a date being mention.
Yep; three days to be exact.
Night of Rage began in Seattle (Tacoma, if memory serves), and quickly spread to most major cities. It was a turning point in SR lore where blatant racism was finally confronted on a massive scale, and many innocents died as a result.
Actually, not quite: The Night of Rage didn't confront racism on a massive scale, it was a worldwide outpouring of racism that had been building. The catalyst being the 14th amendmant giving metahumans rights. That, and similar legislation in others nations, sparked a worldwide race riot for several days. Eventually more pro-metahuman laws were passed, but the damage was already done. Thus the 6th world still has fairly popular groups like the Humanis policlub (well popular, relatively speaking), and racism is still very much a problem, which helps cement that dystopian setting.
That's not quite how I recall it. If memory serves, the 14th amendment of the UCAS Constitution, and similar legislation elsewhere, had already been passed prior to the events of the Night of Rage, and the catalyst of said event was the firebombing of Seattle warehouses holding a mass of detained metahumans (allegedly for their own protection) by the terrorist (and racial supremacist) organization Hand of Five.
Race riots spread across the world as the Seattle Metroplex authorities stood idly by, and Lone Star was almost thrown out of the city for their inaction. When Lone Star finally did react, the Hand of Five was decimated as an organization, and anti-metahuman sentiments became far less accepted than it had been in the past.
I wouldn't say that "the damage was already done", personally. To my mind, the Night of Rage brought metahuman rights to the foreground on a global stage; while thousands of metahumans were killed across the world, the public outcry as a result of these heinous acts directly led to several organizations that had previously been quite open about their anti-metahuman agenda having to change in relatively short order because of the PR backlash their hate crimes prompted. Even the Humanis Policlub is a lightweight when compared to the likes of Alamos 20k and Hand of Five; it's no secret that they are all human supremacy organizations, but Humanis is far from as radical or as open about their hatred as other organizations had been leading up to the Night of Rage.
And incidentally, as it relates to the original topic, the Sears Tower bombing in Chicago definitely left a lasting background count.