Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Few black workers in any Northern city, skilled or unskilled, belonged to unions. The American Federation of Labor remained the dominant force in the American labor movement, and founder Samuel Gompers had given up his earlier attempts at unionizing blacks as futile and going against the grain of racial attitudes in the white rank and file. Although the radical Industrial Workers of the World, which welcomed blacks and unskilled workers, won some bitterly fought labor battles in the first two decades of the century, the overwhelming majority of American labor remained lily white, and serious and effective organizing of black workers by mainstream American labor would not come until the top-to-bottom industrial unionism movement of the 1930s. In some industries, like the railroads, blacks shut out of white unions formed their own labor organizations, but most black workers who emigrated to the North were without union representation.

  Many of them were without jobs as well. Some industrialists used labor agents and newspaper advertisements to lure blacks North with inflated promises, creating a highly visible ready reserve of workers desperate for jobs in case of a strike. As a result, when they arrived in the North, many blacks discovered there were no jobs at all, or that the jobs that were available paid well short of the living wage they had been promised. Some were able to find other jobs, usually at much lower pay than they had expected; a few went back to the South; some ended up on the streets, increasing social friction. But blacks continued arriving weekly in the cities of the North. Even blacks who had jobs paying relatively decent wages down South were heading North in numbers that were alarming to Southern whites. The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, reported:

  Everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses—that is, everybody but those farmers who waked up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on their places gone—to Cleveland, to Pittsburgh, to Chicago, to Indianapolis. Better jobs, better treatment, higher pay—the bait held out is being swallowed by thousands of them about us. And while our very solvency is being sucked from underneath us, we go about our affairs as usual—our police raid pool rooms for “loafing Negroes,” bring in 12, keep them in the barracks all night, and next morning find that 10 of them have steady jobs … Our country officers hear of a disturbance at a Negro resort and bring in fifty-odd men, women, boys, and girls to spend the night in jail, to make a bond at 10 percent, to hire lawyers, to mortgage half of two months wages to get back their jobs Monday morning, although but a half dozen could have been guilty of the disorderly conduct … It was a week following [such arrests] that several Macon employers found good Negroes, men trained in their work, secure and respected in their jobs, valuable assets to their white employers, had suddenly left and gone to Cleveland, “where they didn’t arrest 50 niggers for what three of ’em done.”24

  The U.S. Department of Labor asked dozens of blacks why they had left the South. The reasons they gave included “ravages of boll-weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor housing on plantations, inadequate school facilities, inadequate crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, the desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and finally advice of white friends in the South, where crops had failed.”25

  As the northward migration was gathering strength, the flames of racial prejudice, North and South, were fed by the unprecedented emotional power of a brilliantly constructed new movie celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and portraying Reconstruction Era blacks as ape men lusting after virginal white women. The cinematic innovations of one of the most talented filmmakers of the twentieth century—innovations such as multiple cameras, fast cutting, parallel editing, accelerating pacing, and point-of-view cinematography—made David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, initially released early in 1915, an emotional powerhouse. Over the next two years it played across the country, inspiring pickets and protests by the NAACP and, in some cities, attacks on blacks in the streets and brawls between blacks and whites. The Birth of a Nation was the most viscerally exciting movie of its time, and the most popular. It is no coincidence that the Klan reemerged as a powerful force, and lynching showed a marked increase as The Birth of a Nation was packing in crowds all over the country.

  When it was shown in St. Louis, pickets from the NAACP competed for attention with men and women from something called the United Welfare Association, a group of white neighborhood associations well funded by real estate moguls. The United Welfare Association was gathering signatures on an initiative petition to enact “an ordinance to prevent ill-feeling, conflict and collision between the white and colored races” by requiring “separate blocks for residence,” as well as segregation in churches and dance halls. Similar block-by-block segregation laws had been passed in other American cities in Southern and border states, including Louisville, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Richmond. These laws would be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, but not before the citizens of St. Louis had given a clear indication of the racial mood of the area by voting approval of enforced segregation by a margin of 3 to 1.26

  A special showing of The Birth of a Nation was arranged at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian and friend of the author of The Clansman, the novel on which the movie was based. Legend has it that Wilson was the one who gave the famous description of the movie, “Like writing history with lightning,” and added, “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”27

  CHAPTER 5

  A Nest of Crime and Corruption

  Most of the blacks who arrived in East St. Louis between 1915 and 1917 were men from the slums of Southern cities like Memphis or Jackson or from the impoverished cotton farms of the Mississippi Delta. Some of them had rough manners. Few of them were used to the confusing racial signals of the North in general and the lower Midwest in particular, where they were supposed to be equal to whites, but were not treated that way. They arrived by the coachload and even the trainload. William Roach, who ran the Illinois State Free Employment Bureau in East St. Louis during that period, recalled that he talked to blacks as soon they arrived in town and “they told me they got cheap tickets, and that they were told by the white folks in the South, or some white man told them—sometimes the railroad agents would say it—that there was plenty of work in East St. Louis, good wages, and when they got to East St. Louis we didn’t have anything for them at the time.

  “When a great number of them came in,” he said, “I notified all the railroad superintendents that we had a great many laborers on hand, colored track laborers, and I got jobs for pretty near all of them out of town. That was in 1915, and [even] a part of 1914, and I shipped a great many of them off… I shipped some of them to East Chicago, to Ohio, Indiana, Baltimore, Buffalo … all the way to Kansas City… I done all I could to take care of them. I notified the police department to send in every idle man they could get hold of, and that helped out too.” Many thousands of men passed through his office in downtown East St. Louis between 1915 and 1917. At times, Roach would ship out three coaches, each holding eighty men, twice a week, which came to two thousand men a month.

  Many of the men, he said, had spent their last cent on an excursion ticket to East St. Louis, hoping for work. “Some white fellows told them there was good wages in East St. Louis, in the north, and they headed this way,” he recalled. In late 1915, as fall turned into winter, hundreds arrived every week, many with no luggage, wearing worn cotton overalls and thin work shirts. The men were from the Deep South, and were completely unprepared for snow and sleet and the freezing winds that blew from the west across the icy Mississippi.

  So many of the men were able to buy tickets at such cheap rates that Roach became suspicious, and asked the United States attorney to find out who was subsidizing black migration. He never got an answer. But, he said, it seemed relevant that most of the men he talked to said they had been promised jobs on the railroad, and it was the railroads that were giving them the extraordin
arily cheap rates.1

  As job markets in other cities became saturated, the black men without jobs often stayed in East St. Louis, sleeping in vacant lots or alleys and begging on the streets. Some got hold of cheap guns and pulled holdups. Some of the victims were white. Although the official crime statistics for that period disappeared at least half a century ago into the dark maw of East St. Louis’s corrupt city government, there is little question that the murder, rape, and robbery rate increased in the early years of the Great War, and no question that some of the worst crimes—or at least some of the most highly publicized crimes—were committed by blacks. But the abundance of street crime in East St. Louis could hardly be blamed solely on blacks in a city that essentially had been surrendered by its leaders—its politicians and businessmen and police—to thugs and gangsters, gamblers and prostitutes, and to saloon keepers and their clientele.

  East St. Louis was nationally known as one of the most corrupt and crime-ridden cities in America. There was a widespread legend that a detective from New York who was visiting East St. Louis walked down Broadway one day and recognized three men—none of them apparently with either of the other two—and each of them was wanted for a felony in New York. All were white.2

  In the wide-open red-light district known as the Valley, within sight of city hall and the main police station, hundreds of prostitutes, white and black, openly walked the streets or tapped on windows to lure potential customers inside—where, often, they were beaten and robbed rather than sexually entertained. The prostitutes worked twelve-hour shifts and were divided by the local vernacular into “women of the day” and “women of the night.” They were often arrested, as were the pimps and muggers and gunmen who worked the Valley and adjoining areas of downtown East St. Louis. But those who hired the right lawyers and paid the requisite bribes to the police and the low-level city courts run by justices of the peace were soon released and working again after paying fines. Indeed, the East St. Louis political system depended upon bribes and fines to supplement the earnings of badly paid police and unsalaried justices of the peace, whose income came from court fees.

  Most of the prostitutes and pimps and thugs in East St. Louis were white, even if much of the citizenry was led to believe otherwise. The East St. Louis Daily Journal emphasized and sensationalized black crime, particularly black on white crime. As a result, many East St. Louis whites came to feel as if they were under invasion, particularly on weekends when hundreds of blacks, coming and going, packed the downtown railroad station and roamed the nearby streets looking for food, drink, and amusement.

  Despite the long-standing reputation of the state of Illinois as a haven for persecuted blacks, and despite a considerable body of nineteenth-century legislation forbidding discrimination in the state, much of public life in southern Illinois was segregated. In factories, blacks had separate washrooms and lunch rooms and were given the most menial jobs. Schools had legally been desegregated in the state of Illinois since 1874, but white children in East St. Louis and environs were assigned to all-white schools, and black kids to all-black schools. Although the Illinois legislature in 1885 had passed one of the nation’s first laws forbidding discrimination in public accommodation, bars, restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses were strictly segregated in the southern half of the state, as were all but the lowest whorehouses.3

  Still, in the years before the Great War, many blacks and whites had lived very close to one another in East St. Louis—and sometimes worked side by side—without a great deal of trouble. Years later, at the height of the Depression but before the Second World War once again ripped the social fabric apart—with the memories of the riot somewhat dimmed, although certainly not forgotten—East St. Louis was again a city where a mixed population lived together in relative tolerance. Musician Miles Davis, the son of a dentist, grew up in the 1930s in East St. Louis near Fifteenth Street and Bond Avenue, where blacks and whites lived and worked very close to one another and racial incidents were rare.

  The Davis family lived above a drugstore in their early years, as the father was establishing his practice, and next door was a tavern owned by a black man who played saxophone. Nearby was a soul food restaurant, but next to it was a white-owned dry goods store. “It was run by a German lady,” Davis recalled. “All along 15th paralleling the river toward Bond street were all kinds of stores … owned by blacks, or Jews, or Germans, or Greeks, or Armenians, who had most of the cleaning places. Over on 16th and Broadway this Greek family owned a fish market and made the best jack salmon sandwiches in East St. Louis. I was friends with the son of the guy who owned it.” But even as a boy growing up in a neighborhood where black and white kids played together, Davis, with the paradoxical “double-consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois identified as a necessary and crucial aspect of African American thinking, also understood that most East St. Louis whites were, as he put it, “racist to the bone.”4

  The sensationalist East St. Louis Daily Journal, an evening paper that was closely tied to the Democratic Party on racial and other issues, was East St. Louis’s principal newspaper. But the five mainstream daily newspapers in St. Louis—the Post-Dispatch, the Globe-Democrat, the Republic, the Star, and the Times—covered East St. Louis, and were read by East St. Louisans. All five St. Louis papers had reporters assigned to East St. Louis and most had East St. Louis offices. The two most important, and most widely circulated, of the St. Louis papers were the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which was known for solid, straightforward, sometimes tough-minded local coverage, and the evening St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which, under the leadership of Joseph Pulitzer II, was becoming one of the best newspapers in America. It excelled in national and international as well as crusading local coverage. Editorially, the Globe-Democrat leaned toward the Republicans and the Post-Dispatch tended to favor the Democrats (although it was relatively liberal on racial issues), but both the Post-Dispatch and the Globe-Democrat were modern newspapers in that they at least gave the appearance of being independent of party politics in their news coverage.

  The St. Louis Republic was a struggling morning paper that was owned by a Democratic politician—David Francis, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Russia during the upheavals of 1917—and was old-fashioned in that it often seemed to parrot the party line, racially and otherwise. The St. Louis Star and the St. Louis Times were lavishly illustrated populist afternoon papers that stressed sports, entertainment, and local human interest stories.

  For African Americans in both St. Louis and East St. Louis, the most important source of news about black affairs was the respected black-owned weekly, the St. Louis Argus.

  In the summer of 1916, a brilliant young reporter named Paul Y. Anderson wrote a series in the Post-Dispatch excoriating the administration of Mayor Fred Mollman and police chief Ransom Payne for permitting illegal gambling and prostitution all over the city, including a couple of notorious vice dens virtually across the street from the city hall-police station complex on Main Street in the heart of downtown. Anderson reported that, in 1915, after Mollman had been elected on a “reform” ticket, he placated his more moralistic supporters by issuing an order closing the red-light district, an order that, after a brief flurry of token closings, was widely ignored by police and city officials, including Mayor Mollman himself. After utterly failing to get legendary cigar-chomping Post-Dispatch managing editor O. K. Bovard to fire Anderson for sullying the name of his fair city, Mollman, who was in his mid-forties, spotted Anderson, who was twenty years younger, near city hall one day and took a wild swing at him. He banned Anderson from the press offices in city hall and the police station, which didn’t stop the tenacious young reporter from coming in and badgering recalcitrant city officials until cops shoved him out the door.5

  Paul Y. Anderson

  Mayor Fred Mollman

  Late in the summer of 1916, after Anderson’s articles put pressure on the mayor to clean up open gambling, a member of the police vice squad named H. F. Trafton took it upon
himself to close a downtown bookie joint. It happened to be owned in part by Frank Florence, the assistant chief of detectives. Florence walked in on the raid, pulled his service revolver, and told Trafton to put his hands in the air. Trafton complied, giving the assistant chief of detectives a clear shot at his vitals. Florence shot him dead. There were several witnesses who swore in court that they had seen the whole thing and that Florence was guilty of gunning down a man with his hands in the air, but after a year of legal maneuvering and backroom threats and dealing, Florence was acquitted of the charge of murder, confirming the general feeling that the police were among the last people in East St. Louis you would trust to enforce the law.6

  In July of 1916, three dozen men were fired from National City’s three largest meatpackers—Swift, Armour, and Morris—for trying to organize a union, and more than four thousand workers went out on strike. Management announced it would not negotiate with the strikers, and would only consider hiring them back if they left the union. “There will be no union at this plant,” said the head of one large meatpacker. The meat companies brought in strikebreakers, including between eight hundred and fifteen hundred blacks. The hard stance of management quickly broke the back of the strike. Men began deserting the fledgling union in large numbers and going back to work. The strikers, except for union organizers, were rehired, at least for the moment.7

  In August, management began a new wave of firings and replaced experienced men, some of them with many years of seniority, with cheaper untrained workers, some of them black. Earl Jimmerson, an official of the butchers and meat-cutters union, became alarmed at the potential social cost of continually bringing in black replacement workers. Jimmerson, who had political clout as a member of the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors, told Mayor Fred Mollman that trouble lay ahead unless something was done about “employing Negroes in place of white men … and throwing these [Negroes] right amongst these foreigners … You know what a foreigner is; he will fight at the drop of a hat and if you go to take his job he’ll kill you if he gets the opportunity to do it.” The mayor told Jimmerson to calm down, things weren’t as bad as all that.8