Blacks were also used to break a strike against the streetcar monopoly in that period.
On Saturday, October 7, 1916, about six hundred workers walked off the job at the Aluminum Ore Company in protest against arbitrary pay cuts. On Monday, hundreds of strikers blocked rails and roads leading into the plant. The Aluminum Ore Company easily obtained a federal injunction so the plant could operate—there was a war in Europe, and aluminum was a vital raw material. The Aluminum Ore Company Employee’s Protective Association, a local organization that was not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor—it was little more than a company union, other labor leaders charged—thrashed out an agreement with plant officials to return to work by the end of the week. As soon as the men came back, the company began getting rid of them a few at a time, laying off union men and hiring newcomers, some of them black, to replace them. By late fall two hundred men of a once union-friendly work force of about nineteen hundred had been replaced, and the firings continued into the winter. Workers became discouraged, or afraid, and left the union. Membership dwindled from a peak of about one thousand to a couple of hundred by the end of 1916.9
According to Aluminum Ore Company statistics, the number of black employees rose from a dozen in 1915 to 280 in November of 1916 and to 410 in December. Management was clearly aware of the effect black strikebreakers crossing picket lines had on white workers, and hoped that some of the anger focused on management would be redirected toward the blacks. That was part of the plan, as was evident when R. T. Rucker, assistant superintendent of the Aluminum Ore plant in St. Louis, spoke frankly of the racial attitudes of East St. Louis whites when he said that “Labor unrest … engendered bitterness against the negroes who came in here.”
“The natural antipathy of a white man to a colored man … inherent in each of us,” Rucker said, “was accentuated and exaggerated” by the arrival in East St. Louis of so many blacks.
Also, he said, in cities farther north, “an individual Negro on a streetcar caused no comment,” but East St. Louis was more Southern in its attitudes, particularly when blacks on streetcars “voiced their privileges” and “made themselves nuisances.” Rucker explained that he was talking, in the main, about black men taking empty seats next to white women, and even saying “good morning” to them.10
Most of the blacks hired by the aluminum company in 1916 had lived in East St. Louis for at least a few months, some for years. The aluminum workers union was able to break through racial suspicion on both sides and persuade a few of the new black employees to join the union. Then, according to the union, management changed its tactics. At the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, the company began giving preference to blacks who had just arrived from the South and were without jobs. The newly arrived blacks had been lured to East St. Louis with false promises, union leaders charged, were desperate for work, and would be disinclined to join any white-run labor organization, or afraid to.11
In early October of 1916, a month before the voters would choose between the incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Charles Evans Hughes for president of the United States, Democrats in St. Clair County charged that the Republicans were importing thousands of itinerant blacks into East St. Louis to vote the party line in what was described as “Negro colonization.” The Republicans replied that the charges were spurious and purely political, but Democratic poll watchers appeared at all fifty-four polling places in the city and challenged the residency of all blacks trying to register to vote, even those who had lived in East St. Louis for many years. Something similar, it turned out, was going on across the lower Midwest in areas of recent black migration.12
The St. Louis Argus argued that the widespread challenges to black voters were yet another sign of the enmity toward blacks held by the Democratic Party and President Woodrow Wilson, who had received a significant minority of the black vote in the 1912 election. “Negroes who were seduced into supporting Wilson for President in 1912 are amazed at their own stupidity,” the black weekly declared, “and all but those who are Democrats for revenue only have long since repented and returned to the Republican fold and are working hard to undo the harm they did four years ago.”13
Wilson’s numerous black supporters in 1912 had included W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. Du Bois had met with Wilson and had been won over by his promise to be the “president of all the people.” But after Wilson took office, he replaced a number of relatively high-ranking black officials left over from his Republican predecessors with white appointees, and he permitted his cabinet members—who included Josephus Daniels, the openly racist North Carolina newspaper editor—to segregate federal departments, creating separate black and white toilets and cafeterias. In many cases, blacks who supervised whites were demoted and replaced with white bosses. Wilson presided over the resegregation of federal Washington, which under his Republican predecessors had been a racially mixed haven for educated blacks.14
The Argus advised blacks to vote the straight Republican ticket. And justly wary of drawn-out challenges at the polls it also urged its readers, “Take no chances, vote early.” W. E. B. Du Bois, disgusted with both Wilson and the Republicans, recommended that African Americans either vote for the Socialist candidate or stay home.15
Wilson’s particular version of what later came to be called the Southern Strategy depended in part on minimizing the black electorate and arousing white voters in swing states like Illinois with the notion that blacks were trying to steal the election. The president personally stoked the fire by warning against vote frauds “perpetrated by conscienceless agents of the sinister forces.” Racial antagonism already burned intensely in the border states and the lower Midwest and sometimes flared into deadly conflagration. For example, three weeks before the November election, in Paducah, Kentucky, little more than the width of the Ohio River from southern Illinois, a white mob of six thousand men and women lynched two black men—an accused rapist and a companion—and burned their bodies.16
As the election approached, the East St. Louis Daily Journal, which was backing Wilson, blasted its readers with a series of lurid stories about crimes committed by “black colonizers” who were in East St. Louis without jobs, supporting themselves by breaking into railroad cars in the flood plain that once had been Bloody Island. A white watchman for the Mobile and Ohio was shot dead, apparently by a black man looting cars, and police chief Ransom Payne blamed a recent rash of crime on “Negroes [who] come into East St. Louis, are not known, shoot or rob someone, and get out before we know who they are.”17 Ironically, in the midst of this supposed black crime wave, the suburban Belleville News-Democrat reported that blacks “must be behaving very well this fall.” Population at the county jail in Belleville, black and white, was actually lower than it had been in recent years. The editor speculated that blacks didn’t need to rob people because “it’s election year and the negroes in East St. Louis are being pretty well taken care of.” He added, “Jailers expect the rush to begin after Nov. 7.”18
In mid-October, a strong rumor swept through East St. Louis that a large group of blacks was planning on voting in Chicago at dawn, catching a train south and stopping at some town along the way to vote again, and arriving in East St. Louis before the polls closed to vote a third time. Another battalion of blacks was allegedly going to make the same journey in reverse. In charge of the scam, according to Democratic state prosecutors in northern Illinois, was East St. Louis’s own Dr. Leroy H. Bundy, a prosperous black dentist and entrepreneur who was the leading civil rights advocate in St. Clair County, a leader in the local chapter of the Afro-American Protective League.19 (Although a branch of the NAACP had been founded in St. Louis in 1914, East St. Louis would not have one until 1924.)
A former member of the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors, Bundy was the proud—even at times prideful—son of a prominent black family in Cleveland. In his mid-thirties, hard working, and ambitious, he invested money from his dental practice in a small car dealership,
a gas station, and an auto repair shop. He was outspoken and sometimes argumentative in his support of full equal rights for blacks. He was the sort of “New Negro” resented by many whites. The Chicago Defender described him as a “natural” leader whom “the ordinary fellow looks to for guidance.”20
Bundy was arrested in Chicago and held for questioning on allegations that he had masterminded at least three hundred illegal registrations in four predominantly black wards of that city’s south and west sides. He was soon released for lack of evidence, and the charges eventually died away, but the East St. Louis Daily Journal played the report of Bundy’s arrest as the turn story at the top of the right-hand column of the front page, the most prominent location in the paper. Below the Bundy report, in a secondary position, was a story headlined, HEAD OF MURDERED BOY FOUND IN DUMP. In the most horrific crime in years, a three-year-old boy had been kidnapped and beheaded by East St. Louis gangsters. The body and head were found in separate locations. The victim was white. So were the kidnappers.21
Two weeks before the November election, Wilson’s Justice Department announced that it was launching investigations into voting fraud in Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. The announcement was vague, but there was little doubt in the minds of Republicans that the principal targets were thousands of newly registered black voters in those three swing states. Four days later, the chairman of the Republican National Committee struck back, charging that the Democrats were trying to frighten black voters by false charges of colonization and by challenging the right to vote of thousands of legitimate black voters in cities like East St. Louis. He announced, “A bold attempt to disenfranchise Negro voters in the North as well as in the South is the latest scheme of the Wilson campaign managers.” He further noted that the conspiracy, although clearly illegal, was proceeding without interference from Democratic federal prosecutors, who were interested only in Republican crimes.22
Woodrow Wilson won a narrow victory on November 7, carrying the South and the West while losing almost all of the Northeast and the North Central states. His victory was greeted in Washington with rebel yells. Wilson took St. Clair County by a few hundred votes, although his defeated Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, carried the state of Illinois. The Democratic machine kept all its seats on the East Side Levee and Sanitation Board, with its hundreds of thousands of dollars in county, state, and federal flood-control funds sitting in interest-free accounts in politically favored banks. Democratic mayor Fred Mollman was safe—he would not be up for reelection until the spring of 1917. And the powerful local congressman William Rodenberg, closely aligned with the East St. Louis political machine, won reelection. Rodenberg was a Republican, but that really didn’t matter. At the end of the day, the politicians from both parties in East St. Louis would get together and carve up the pie once again.
A couple of weeks before the election, to insure the machine candidates got the church vote, Mollman and police chief Payne had closed a few shady establishments. Immediately after the election, those barrel houses, juke joints, and brothels reopened, and a full panoply of whores went back to work in time for the victory celebrations.23
After the election, it became clear that Democratic charges of thousands of illegal black voters in southern Illinois—and as many as three hundred thousand nationwide, according to Wilson’s attorney general—had been grossly exaggerated. The November 1916 election in East St. Louis seems to have been no more dishonest than usual, perhaps ironically in part because all the lies and false rumors on the front pages of newspapers alerted poll watchers of both parties and both races. After all the furor and all the challenges, the bipartisan Board of Election Commissioners ended up striking only 86 blacks from the registration rolls.24
Mayor Mollman himself, a Democrat with significant black support, later made peace within the bipartisan machine by downplaying his party’s inflammatory preelection charges that Republicans had “imported” thousands of black voters to southern Illinois. What the Republicans actually did, he said, was work hard to register those blacks who had already established residency. As for the newcomers, most of them came looking for work but “in numbers larger than could be utilized,” he said, in what may have been his first public hint that some of the employment practices of the local captains of industry might be problematic in the long term.25
Be that as it may, the repeated charges of “Negro colonization” in the weeks leading up to the election strengthened the feeling of many East St. Louis whites that their community was under siege by thousands of blacks who were up to no good.
CHAPTER 6
The May Riot
On the first Sunday of 1917, prodded by a disapproving visit from stiff-necked federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of Chicago, East St. Louis mayor Fred Mollman and police chief Ransom Payne began enforcing the ban on Sunday drinking. What’s more, Mollman closed down completely, if not permanently, about fifty of the city’s more notorious saloons. More than half of those saloons happened to be places with predominantly black patrons, which could have presented the mayor with a potential problem. Angry black voters and politically powerful black saloon owners might turn against him, and he had an election against a “good government” candidate coming up in three months. But he had tried to fix that.1
Prior to the closings, Mollman had a quiet chat with a politically well-connected black lawyer named Noah W. Parden, and Parden passed the message on to his constituents in the alcoholic beverage, numbers, and prostitution trades, men with such names as Hophead Nelson, Red-shirt Frank, Alabama Jack, Seven Hundred Dollar Jimmie, and Long Tom Lewis. If the crucial black vote went to Mollman and he was reelected in April, Parden explained, things would “loosen up” after the election—and maybe even before then, if the saloonkeepers would keep their patrons from overt acts of criminality in the immediate vicinity of certain drinking establishments.2
On February 15, the East St. Louis Daily Journal aroused its readers with a front-page story headlined, NEGRO BRUTE SEIZES WHITE GIRL OF 19. (The girl was unharmed; the “brute” she said had grabbed her could not be found.) Four days later the three-hour epic movie The Birth of a Nation—which had swept through much of the country two years before, triggering small riots, Klan marches, and sporadic picketing by the NAACP—finally opened for a three-day run at the Majestic theater in downtown East St. Louis. The theater was packed with families. Twice a day, a few blocks from black neighborhoods, the flickering white knights of a Klan-like army rescued Southern damsels on screen from the paws of blacks who, to movie patrons, resembled those men hanging around downtown in ever-increasing numbers, some of them actually sitting next to white women on the streetcar.3
Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender, relentless promoter of black migration to the North, outdid himself in 1917 with an extravaganza of ballyhoo called the Great Northern Drive. This mass exodus of the South was set to begin on Thursday, May 15, but the Defender began promoting it months ahead of time, and many thousands of readers in the South were so excited about the prospects of life in what Abbott’s paper referred to as the “Promised Land” that they couldn’t wait. All winter the paper was full of reports of blacks leaving Tampa, Jackson, Huntsville, Birmingham, and dozens of other Southern locales, heading for points north. As the spring of 1917 and the official date of the Great Northern Drive approached, the weekly paper promoted migration even more intently, urging its hundreds of thousands of black readers to “Leave to all quarters of the globe. Get out of the South.” Week after week, articles promoted the drive it characterized as the “Flight out of Egypt.”
The movement succeeded beyond even Abbott’s grandiose expectations. The white South watched in dismay as train after train packed with its former farmhands and mill workers headed North, leaving fields fallow or un-harvested, looms still, and band saws silent. “The loss of her best labor is another penalty Georgia is paying for her indifference in suppressing mob law,” opined the Atlanta Constitution, noting that the heaviest migrat
ion came from “those counties in which there have been the worst outbreaks against Negroes.” Public officials used legal subterfuges to sidetrack trains for days and even resorted to inducing black preachers to plead with men and women waiting in stations with segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains for trains to Chicago or St. Louis. Things would be better, they promised. Stay.
TURN A DEAF EAR, responded the Defender. “You see they are not lifting their laws to help you. Are they? Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars? Can you buy a Pullman sleeper where you wish? Will they give you a square deal in court yet? … Turn a deaf ear to the scoundrel, and let him stay. Above all, see to it that that jumping jack preacher is left in the South, for he means you no good here in the North.”
A poem arrived anonymously from the South, fifteen stanzas long, and Abbott printed—and reprinted—the whole thing. A sample stanza read:
Why should I remain longer south
To be kicked and dogged around?
Crackers to knock me in the mouth
And shoot my brother down.
I would rather the cold to snatch my breath
And die from natural cause
Never Been a Time Page 10