The following year, the Georgia legislature, which had only one black member, passed the new governor’s disenfranchisement bill, a bundle of restrictions based on ancestry, economic status, and “character” designed to shut most blacks out of voting. “Nowhere in this bill,” boasted one white legislator, “is the word ‘nigger’ written.” In a subsequent referendum, the voters of the state by a 2 to 1 margin approved making the bill an amendment to the Georgia constitution. Neither the national Republican Party nor its Georgia branch gave any support to the blacks who opposed the new law. By 1910, the percentage of Georgia’s blacks who were registered voters had plunged from 28 percent to 4.3 percent.21
Although the Atlanta riot initially energized the opposition to Booker T. Washington, political infighting between Trotter and Du Bois and their supporters split the Niagara movement, and the organization was languishing when the struggle for black rights was galvanized in 1908 by another riot, this one in the North.22
In Springfield, Illinois, the white wife of a streetcar conductor said that a black man had raped her. After the man was arrested, thousands of whites assembled downtown in front of the city jail. When they discovered that the accused rapist and another black man who had been accused of murdering a white railroad engineer had been taken to another town for safety, the mob burned and pillaged black neighborhoods, destroyed parts of downtown, including white-owned businesses, and lynched two law-abiding, middle-class black men, including a black barber who was hanged from a tree in front of a saloon. It took state militia men, who eventually numbered in the thousands, two days to stop the riot.23
Springfield, the home and burial place of Abraham Lincoln, seemed like a highly unlikely place for a race riot. It had a very small black population of about twenty-five hundred out of a total of forty-seven thousand, and the black population had not being growing, as it had been in most other cities hit by race riots. What Springfield did have was a corrupt city government that permitted vice districts to flourish in and around downtown, serving the large population of well-heeled men who travel in and out of any state capital, men who are single, at least for the time being, and looking for a good time. Much of the shady activity was concentrated in and around Springfield’s downtown, including a heavily black area of cheap saloons, whorehouses, and gambling joints known as the Badlands. According to stories in the newspapers and pronouncements from the pulpit, crime and public indolence were on the rise in downtown Springfield, and blacks were blamed.
After the riot, the local papers reported that white petty criminals and unemployed saloon loafers had formed the core of the rioters. That was undoubtedly true in part, as it often is in race riots. However, many of those arrested for rioting were single young white men with low-paying jobs, which is also often the case. Initially at least, the rioters were encouraged in their attacks by middle-class white spectators. Black criminals and their haunts may have been an original target of the rioters, but as the riot went into its second day, the attacks shifted to a middle-class black neighborhood about two miles from downtown. A black woman who had been a little girl during the riot recalled many years later, “See, the people that they harmed and hurt were not really the no-gooders. They were busy hurting the prominent … We owned property; many whites didn’t. There was a great deal of animosity toward any well-established Negro who owned his house and had a good job.” Historian Roberta Senechal, who made a thorough reevaluation of the Springfield riot in the 1990s, concluded, “Although what triggered the riot may have been anger over black crime, very clearly whites were expressing resentment over any black presence in the city at all. They also clearly resented the small number of successful blacks in the city.”24
Later, the woman whose rape accusation had ignited the riot admitted she had lied. It appeared that she had invented the story to hide an affair—with a white man. The accused rapist was set free, as were dozens of whites arrested for rioting. All-white juries acquitted all but one of the men whose cases came to trial. That man spent thirty days in jail.
The Springfield, Illinois, riot shocked the nation, perhaps in great part because the events took place not just in the North but in a city so closely associated with the Great Emancipator, a connection that was not lost on the rioters. Reportedly, members of the mob shouted “Lincoln freed you, now we’ll show you where you belong!”
In reaction to the riot, an interracial organization called the National Negro Conference was formed to fight for African American rights. This time the impetus came from white liberals, who would dominate the organization in its early years, but W. E. B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett—in 1895, the fiery crusader had married black lawyer-journalist Ferdinand L. Barnett—were also among the founders of the conference.
After a long and volatile series of meetings in New York in May and June of 1909, the National Negro Conference, now one thousand strong, voted to reprimand new president William Howard Taft, who had said he would only appoint blacks who were approved of by the South to federal positions. The conference called for strict enforcement of civil rights laws, enfranchisement of African Americans in all parts of the country, and equal educational opportunities for blacks. The following year, the National Negro Conference became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and W. E. B. Du Bois left Atlanta University for New York to become the organization’s director of publicity and research, the top salaried position. The first task he set for himself was to start a national monthly magazine that would focus on the black struggle in America. He wrote later, “Stepping, therefore, in 1910 out of my ivory tower of statistics and investigation, I sought with bare hands to lift the earth and put it in the path in which I conceived it ought to go.”
The magazine, called the Crisis, was an almost immediate success. And within a few years the NAACP—and W. E. B. Du Bois, its principal spokesman—became dominant forces in American black thought and political action. By 1914, the NAACP had fifty branch offices and more than six thousand members.25
CHAPTER 4
East St. Louis and the Great Exodus
Every major city needs a workbench, a trash heap, a washbasin; some kind of repository for the unattractive yet essential elements of urban life—slaughterhouses, smokestacks, rail yards, and even those who make them work. Industrial suburbs house those elements. Philadelphia needs Camden, Chicago needs Gary, Cincinnati needs Covington, and St. Louis needs East St. Louis.
—Andrew J. Theising, Made in USA: East St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri, founded by French fur traders on the west bank of the Mississippi River in the late eighteenth century, became in the early nineteenth century the main beneficiary of the immense wealth generated by the virtual decimation of the beaver population of the western territories. Across the Mississippi in Illinois, a tiny mercantile settlement named Illinoistown struggled along on leavings from the fur bonanza. Between the two towns—near the middle of the Mississippi and carved by swift brown currents—lay a no-man’s-land of shifting sands and the flood-bleached carcasses of dead trees that made a perfect locale for a popular male pastime of the era, the fighting of duels. The island where men shot and killed other men came to be called Bloody Island.
The St. Louis fur trade depended on the city being a viable port with direct access by water to the Ohio River, New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the world. Then something ominous began to happen. The channel along the west bank of the Mississippi, which carried the river past the long rows of head-high fur bundles on the St. Louis levee, was slowly silting up.
More and more of the water in the river, it appeared, was flowing along the east bank, deepening the channel on the Illinois side. When the largest boats began getting stuck in the muck at what was billed as a deepwater port at St. Louis, powerful Missouri businessmen and politicians decided something had to be done. They looked to the east, to Bloody Island.
Any doubts as to how to solve the problem, and to whose benefit, were overridden
by the political reality. Democrat Thomas Hart Benton of St. Louis, who ironically had helped give the wayward island its name by shooting another lawyer dead on its river-washed sand, was the most powerful man in the United States Senate, in great part because he was an old friend and former military aide de camp of President Andrew Jackson. And so, in 1837, Lieutenant Robert E. Lee was dispatched with a group of muckers from the Army Corps of Engineers to the east bank of the Mississippi, and they built a dike between the Illinois shore and Bloody Island. Over the next few years, millions of tons of water, frustrated in its easterly course, flowed west of Bloody Island and scoured out the channel on the St. Louis side of the river so the city was once again a deepwater port. To the east, sediment built up around the dike and soon attached Bloody Island to the mainland of Illinois. The island with its legacy of death became the riverfront, and, eventually, the railroad yards and westernmost slums of the town that in midcentury became East St. Louis.
It would not be the last time that the interests of the larger city to the west prevailed over those of its smaller and less-affluent namesake across the water, but the leavings for East St. Louis were not inconsiderable as the century advanced. Because of its location a short ferry ride east of America’s fourth-largest city and westernmost metropolis, the gateway to the West, East St. Louis became one of the nation’s major railroad centers, the western terminus for twenty-two eastern rail lines. And the rail yards attracted industry.1
Until the ruggedly graceful, latticed-iron Eads Bridge was built across the Mississippi at St. Louis in 1874, crossing the southern tip of the land that had been Bloody Island, everything that went west from East St. Louis had to be unloaded off wagons or railroad cars, ferried across the wide, deep, swift, perilous river, and loaded up again on horse-drawn carts that would haul the goods up the St. Louis levee to wagons and freight trains pointed west. And even after the bridge was completed, a monopoly held by minor-league robber barons in St. Louis, who had paid dearly for it in a fight with major-league robber baron Jay Gould, charged exorbitant rates to cross what they thought of as “their bridge,” even though it, too, was in part built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Not until the fall of 1916 was something called the Free Bridge finally completed a mile or so downriver from the Eads Bridge. At that point, the Free Bridge accommodated only foot and automobile traffic, no trains or streetcars. But at least it was free.2
In the Civil War era, both St. Louis in eastern Missouri and the cities and towns of southern Illinois had been torn over the issue of slavery, as a population that in great part sympathized with the South found itself in states officially aligned with the Union. The area was touched by the violent demonstrations that broke out over the Civil War draft, but the focus of the draft riots was in the cities of the Northeast, particularly New York.
During the migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a few thousand Southern blacks moved north to East St. Louis, got menial jobs in the growing number of plants in the area, and found homes downtown and south of Broadway in what became known as the South End. Perhaps the first black man of note to travel north to East St. Louis was a poor young Alabama musician named William Christopher Handy, who visited briefly in 1892. He spent a few weeks in East St. Louis, and got a job working for a company that manufactured railroad equipment. Years later, in a letter to a friend, he recalled, “I … pawned my watch for food and lodging to my employer, who stood in with corrupt East St. Louis Police. This [black] man took my two weeks’ wages, and kept my watch for the board and lodging, and wouldn’t let me have my laundry and clothes. I went to the police for redress, and they threatened to take me in for vagrancy if I pressed the charge. If you don’t think that in those days there was corruption in East St. Louis, you have but to do a little research.”
One night Handy was sleeping beneath a pier of the Eads Bridge on the Missouri side of the river when he was awakened by black hoboes plucking homemade guitars and singing a lament about East St. Louis. “It had numerous one-line verses,” he later recalled, “and they would sing it all night.” The song went on and on, but it kept returning to the same two lines:
I walked all the way from old East St. Louis,
And I didn’t have but one po’ measly dime.3
It was one of the first times he heard the blues. Handy wrote that “the primitive Southern Negro” would “bear down on the third and seventh notes of the scale, slurring between major and minor.” The eerie modal sound, like nothing that came out of Europe, stayed with him. Handy would use flatted thirds and sevenths in his own blues-based compositions, and those two kinds of notes became known as “blue notes.” It is worth mentioning that Handy and the singing black hoboes may have had the blues in St. Louis, but they got them across the Mississippi in East St. Louis.4
By the early twentieth century, St. Louis had become a prosperous industrial city sometimes called “Old Smoky.” Its furnaces, fueled by sulfurous southern Illinois soft coal, polluted the air so badly that you sometimes couldn’t see half a block down the street. Rich men built larger and larger mansions further and further west, taking advantage of the prevailing west winds to keep their eyes and lungs clear of the very pollution that provided their fortunes. A large middle class moved into the sturdy brick houses the rich had vacated, still comfortable, if noticeably etched by acid rain.
East St. Louis, downwind of the pungent sky-darkening pollution of the larger city to the west, also developed a middle class, but a small one that tended to live in modest brick and frame houses built with its members in mind, and the wealth flowed across the river to St. Louis, or north and east to Chicago and New York. East St. Louis was a poor city, which was made daily poorer by the crooked politicians and thieves who ran it through most of its history, and by its absentee landlords, most of whom didn’t even pay taxes to support East St. Louis.
In the 1870s, East Coast money built the St. Louis National Stock Yards, but not in St. Louis, nor even in East St. Louis. The stockyards lay just north of the East St. Louis city limits in unincorporated St. Clair County. The Vanderbilts and other stockyard investors built a fancy hotel with a four-star restaurant that, naturally, specialized in beef. Soon meatpackers like Armour and Swift began moving in, right next to livestock pens that could accommodate 15,000 cattle, 10,000 sheep, and 20,000 hogs ready for slaughter. That capacity would double by 1917. None of these enterprises, known collectively as the Meat Trust, paid taxes in East St. Louis, although they polluted the city’s air and water and depended on the city’s fire department for help if a cattle shed suddenly burst into flame. The northeast side of East St. Louis, adjacent to the stockyards, stank of burnt cowhide and rotting pig guts. In 1907, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle exposed filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry and led to the passage of federal meat inspection laws. About the same time, East St. Louis began annexing unincorporated land. The Meat Trust responded to the threats by wrapping itself in a legal cloak, creating the village of National City, Illinois, with about 250 human residents, a mayor picked by the Trust, and a tax assessor who was also on the payroll of one of the meatpackers.
By then, William Neidringhaus, a St. Louis robber baron, had expanded his steel works into Illinois. He bought land north of East St. Louis and created Granite City. Other wealthy industrialists built plants in Granite City and on unincorporated land nearby, and eventually companies like Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis and the Aluminum Ore Company, an ancestor of Alcoa whose principal investors included Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh, would also have their own little towns, relatively free of taxes and pouring out sulfur-laden smoke that seemed to find its way freely across municipal limits. At the time of the First World War, the largest single employer of East St. Louis men and women was the Aluminum Ore Company, which refined ore from Arkansas as part of the national aluminum trust. The company sprawled across the prairie in unincorporated St. Clair County bordering East St. Louis, and its political clout w
as sufficient to beat back any attempts by St. Clair County to increase its minimal taxes. The Rockefellers’ Standard Oil put a notably polluting refining plant in Wood River, in Madison County north of East St. Louis, and soon other refiners came and joined in.5 As late as the end of the twentieth century, “Wood River” remained a synonym in the St. Louis area for lingering chemical pollution that could maim and kill and was particularly dangerous to small children.
The Aluminum Ore Company
As East St. Louis became known as the “Pittsburgh of the West” and, perhaps less flatteringly, as the “Hoboken of St. Louis,” plants spread across the unregulated landscape, most of them paying wages that guaranteed little more than a lifetime of poverty. The first major strike in the East St. Louis area in the twentieth century came in the summer of 1904 at the packing houses of National City. At the same time, across the river, St. Louis was hosting its World’s Fair, with millions of visitors from around the world coming to see the astonishing technological artifices of what came to be called the American Century. The St. Louis World’s Fair was an unprecedented display of American might and ingenuity that trumpeted the Darwinian supremacy of the white race. A few miles and a wide river to the east of the fairgrounds where millions watched the Zulus and the pygmies dance near model industrial plants, Swift and Armour called out the Pinkertons and brought in strikebreakers to crush the uprising of men who butchered cows and pigs and waded in blood for a living.
Although some of the strikebreakers were black, the majority were recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. They stepped into jobs unwillingly vacated by men who called themselves “Americans” or “native Americans,” the sons and grandsons of Irishmen and Scotsmen and Germans. The union men referred to the European strikebreakers as “white Sambos” or, if their skin was sufficiently swarthy, simply “niggers.” As the century advanced, the southern and eastern European immigrants began to be accepted into the workplaces, the unions, the neighborhoods, and even the families of the northern European immigrants who had preceded them. In a sociological term of more recent currency, the Italians and Greeks and Poles and Turks “achieved whiteness,” while African Americans remained the target of white America’s racial prejudice. Most of the African Americans who had served as strikebreakers—and earned the persistent hatred of white union members for doing it—were gone from the stockyards within a few years, only to be summoned back the next time there was a strike.6
Never Been a Time Page 7