After seeing the chaos in the streets, Mayor Mollman ran back inside city hall and called Major Ralph W. Cavanaugh, who was in charge of the national guardsmen at National City and at the Aluminum Ore Company plant. Cavanaugh said there was nothing he could do without authority from above. So Mollman called Illinois National Guard headquarters in Springfield, and was bounced from office to office, trying to find someone who could order two hundred troops a mile away to come rescue the city and its black citizens.47
Southeast of downtown, Dr. Lyman Bluitt, a black physician, got a call about nine P.M. to go down to the police station and care for people who had been injured. He was headed north on Tenth Street when he was met by a crowd of black people trotting south. “Don’t go that way,” they warned. “There’s trouble that way.” He cut over to Seventh Street, where he was stopped by another group of a dozen blacks. “Don’t go that way. They’re pulling men off the street and they’ll tear you to pieces.” So he made a U-turn and drove back to his office and called the police station. He told the desk sergeant what had happened, and said, “maybe I better not come down there.” The sergeant allowed as how that might be best. “We’ll send the ambulance for you.”
Bluitt had barely hung up the phone when it rang again. The sergeant told him not to wait for the ambulance but to go to a small hospital well east of downtown. Bluitt drove there, and treated two black men who had been beaten. Before he was through, another dozen or more injured black men were brought in. He worked through the night and well into the next morning as new patients kept coming in every few minutes until about midnight, when admissions slowed. Two of the men he treated were shot, but most of the patients had head wounds from being beaten and kicked, and broken arms or legs.48
The mob downtown apparently wearied of bloodshed by midnight, and perhaps ran out of easily caught victims. “Come on fellows, let’s go home,” a leader of the riot shouted. “Tomorrow we’ll be ready for them. Tomorrow we’ll have guns. We’ll burn them out. We’ll run them out of town.” Most of the men left. A few stragglers went to the downtown railroad station looking for more trouble. A trainload of Southern blacks was rumored to be scheduled to arrive any time. The rumor was false. Blacks were leaving town, not coming into it. Hundreds of black men, women, and children were heading through downtown toward the Free Bridge carrying bundles or suitcases. The whites let them pass and cheered them on their way.
By the next morning, tempers had cooled. Mollman called in the entire police force of about seventy men, and announced that groups of men larger than five would be thrown in jail. Saloons, theaters, and schools were closed, and Mollman said anyone who sold guns to blacks in East St. Louis would be arrested. After a report appeared in the afternoon Post-Dispatch that pawnshops in the St. Louis black neighborhood known as the Chestnut Valley were doing a brisk business in firearms, Mollman called the mayor of St. Louis and asked that the sale of firearms to blacks be stopped there, too. That was done. East St. Louis detectives were stationed at the Illinois approach to bridges and ordered to search all blacks coming in and confiscate weapons. Police arrested dozens of black men carrying guns. As they were brought into the police station, the handcuffed men were jeered and threatened by crowds of whites milling around in front of the police station.49
That morning, Mollman was finally able to reach Governor Frank Lowden, who agreed to call out the Illinois National Guard. Lowden also freed Major Cavanaugh to send his men into the central city, if needed. National guardsmen began arriving that afternoon. By then, the riot had sputtered back to life. Shacks were burning in black neighborhoods, and whites were throwing bricks and paving stones through windows in black neighborhoods and at blacks in the streets. Black and white gangs were taking shots at one another just north of downtown. But, as the number of guardsmen grew to a couple of hundred, armed platoons were sent to trouble spots and ordered to disperse crowds, show no racial favoritism, and be ready to fire their rifles or use their unsheathed bayonets to protect life or property. As midnight approached on May 29, soldiers were rushed by truck out to the Aluminum Ore Company, where they broke up a workers’ demonstration, and the riot fizzled out. By the next day, several hundred Illinois national guardsmen under the control of Colonel E. P. Clayton had the situation in hand. Major Cavanaugh and his troops remained camped on the edge of town, guarding against saboteurs.
No one was killed in the May riot. A number of people were arrested, most of them black. The Journal railed against a “foreign and lawless negro element” in a front-page editorial that continued:
The lamentable transpiracies here within the past 24 hours are being attributed to an antagonism of the white against the negroes, culminating in a race riot. This is not the real case. The trouble arose over the large influx here of penal and shiftless negroes from the south who upon arriving here and finding no employment are thrown about the streets in idleness to shift for themselves. Amongst them are many lawless and violent characters who have resorted to assault upon white people … There is none of this feeling against the older, law-abiding and long resident portion of our negro population who are in no sense responsible for the criminality of the late negro emigration here and, hence, the trouble is not really a race one.
The black-owned St. Louis Argus, on other hand, knew race trouble when it saw it, and knew whom to blame. UNION LEADERS START RACE RIOTS, the Argus proclaimed in a front-page banner headline on June 1, and the story traced the trouble back to when the aluminum workers struck and “were displaced by Negroes.”
“During these six or eight weeks of the strike,” the Argus opined, “the Negroes were getting a firmer hold on the industrial situation; and strikers were getting weaker and hungrier each day… the Negro labor, honest and conscientious, was fast winning the hearts of the managers of the firm.”50
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also called the events of May 28 and 29 a “race riot,” and its report led off with two blacks being shot and nine others severely beaten in the first hours of the riot. The Post-Dispatch noted that “five negroes had been arrested for carrying concealed weapons and one white man was arrested for throwing a brick.” The Post-Dispatch warned that further trouble could be expected since “the negroes, in anticipation of another attack were preparing to resist [and] it was expected that a large number of additional negroes will arrive on evening trains from the South.”51
The predicted trainloads of blacks never showed up. It seems likely that blacks in the South read and heard about what had been going on in East St. Louis—word spread fast through the underground telegraph of black railroad porters—and decided to stay home or head somewhere else, thus taking some of the pressure off the city by temporarily lessening the illusion that blacks were arriving in East St. Louis by the trainloads. It would take several more weeks for racial anger in East St. Louis to build up to a second and much more devastating explosion.
CHAPTER 7
Shots in the Dark
The topic of Reverend George W. Allison’s sermon at the First Baptist Church in East St. Louis for the first Sunday in June was “The Race Problem.”
“God has no pets,” Allison proclaimed in a plea for racial tolerance. But the tough, crusading preacher also suggested that the races, at least for the time being, should live and work and study and marry and worship apart. He intoned, “The black man never had a chance until he was set out on his own initiative. It was separate schools that produced Booker T. Washington … The attempt to equalize the races is a sin against both the black and white man.” The sermon, coming from a rare voice of moderation and tolerance in East St. Louis, suggests what small steps even the supposed racial liberals of the time were willing to take to gain racial peace.1
Meanwhile, East St. Louis labor leaders had sent a telegram to the Illinois Council of Defense, the state’s civil defense overseer, arguing that the racial situation in East St. Louis threatened war industries and should be investigated. Two members of the council’s labor committee and a st
aff counsel came to East St. Louis for hearings on June 7 and 8. They interviewed dozens of witnesses, including city officials, policemen, black leaders, white industrialists, and several unemployed black men who had recently come to East St. Louis because they had been told there were jobs to be had.2
In its report, the committee attributed the riot on May 28 to “the excessive and abnormal number of negroes” in East St. Louis. “There was resentment that the colored people, having overcrowded their quarters, were spreading out into sections of the city regarded as exclusively the precincts of the white people. The colored men, large numbers of whom had been induced there and who could find no jobs, in their desperate need were … threatening the existing standards of labor.”
The committee charged that there had been “an extensive campaign to induce negroes to come to East St. Louis … a campaign [that] required considerable financing,” including “extensive advertising” in Southern newspapers “setting forth the allurements in East St. Louis in the way of abundant work, short hours, and high wages, good conditions and treatment.” Labor agents, the committee reported, “were also shown to have been very active in the South,” sending black men North by rail. “At convenient points these agents would leave the car with the remark that they had telegrams to send, or would get lunch. They never came back, and the train pulled out without them. The negroes were thus left to shift for themselves upon their arrival at East St. Louis, to find work as they could and quarters as they might.”
Although the committee stopped just short of definitively stating who was behind this anonymous campaign to import blacks to East St. Louis, it observed that “during the previous year there had been industrial troubles in several of the plants of the city,” and took note of allegations by witnesses “that employers had brought about the extraordinary influx of colored men to have a surplus of labor and thus defeat the contentions of their employees.”3
The attacks on blacks in the streets of East St. Louis that had intensified into a small riot on May 28 continued in June. Police stopped one such assault, let the whites go, and arrested three African Americans for carrying concealed weapons. An old black man was beaten almost to the point of death by a gang of young whites after he allegedly refused to give up his seat on a streetcar to a white woman. He staggered to a nearby firehouse, where police had to rescue him from a mob of several hundred whites. Black strikebreakers were beaten outside the aluminum plant so regularly that, toward the end of June, national guardsmen were ordered to escort black workers on the night shift back and forth between work and home.4
Strife between labor and management intensified across the city. Both the streetcar workers and the retail workers went out on strike. But street crime was down, at least for a few weeks. With hundreds of troops in town and the police on alert and under orders to brook no nonsense, criminals, black and white, were laying low. On June 15, the Journal gave big play to the story of a black robber who had held up a white man, noting that this was the first such occurrence in the two and a half weeks since the May riot. But rumors continued to spread through the white population that blacks were buying guns and were preparing to storm white neighborhoods and slaughter whites to exact revenge for the assaults of May 28.
Some blacks were buying guns, despite the mayor’s ban on East St. Louis gun and pawnshops from selling weapons to African Americans. Policemen and national guardsmen stationed at the bridges from St. Louis would regularly stop blacks coming into East St. Louis and confiscate any weapons they found. Whites were waved on through, and a few very light-skinned blacks supplemented their income by buying several guns a week in St. Louis and passing for white as they toted them across the Free Bridge. Black funeral homes with hearses traveling between the two cities sometimes stashed a few guns in coffins. Still, despite a public statement by Mayor Mollman that “colored people … had made no individual retaliations to defend themselves,” the rumors of black aggression against whites persisted. Blacks tried to avoid giving the impression that they were plotting aggressive action. For example, since 1909 the local black chapter of the Odd Fellows lodge had held weekend parades in military formation on Bond Avenue, wearing lodge uniforms and carrying ceremonial swords, but without guns. The rumor spread that Dr. Leroy Bundy, who lived on Bond Avenue, was drilling the Odd Fellows for battle in the streets. After the May 28 riot, the parades ceased.5
Still, Thomas G. Hunter, a black surgeon, recalled, “Things grew worse and worse. The colored people were greatly terrified. We sent committees to … the governor, to the mayor. Some of us went down to see the mayor, and the mayor’s secretary, Mr. [Maurice] Ahearn, stopped us and asked us what we wanted.” Hunter told Ahearn that he and assistant county supervisor Dan White, a black man, recently had been stopped at the Free Bridge by soldiers armed with rifles and told to put their hands in the air. While the soldiers were searching them and poking through the tool box in Dr. Hunter’s car, an automobile passed by carrying two large trunks. The car, driven by a white man, was waved through the check point.
“Why don’t you search that?” Hunter had asked, lowering one hand to gesture at the passing automobile. “It looks more suspicious than I do.”
A soldier poked him with a rifle and snarled, “If you don’t shut up your beefing, I’ll fill you full of lead.” Hunter thrust his hands high and kept his mouth shut.6
Early in June, a committee headed by Bundy and Dr. Lyman B. Bluitt responded to telephone calls from the Central Trades Labor Union and met with the regional labor organization. The union leaders, including Earl Jimmerson of the meat cutters, wanted to talk about organizing blacks. A biracial committee was appointed to look into the matter, but nothing was done beyond that. Bundy and Bluitt also warned Mayor Mollman, whom they had supported for reelection, that eventually some black man would get mad enough to retaliate against white attackers, and perhaps trigger a riot, unless the police stopped standing by while whites assaulted blacks. The mayor said he was surprised to hear their concern—he thought relations between the races had improved considerably since the end of May. But he told Bundy and Bluitt that their complaints would be thoroughly studied. He called in police chief Ransom Payne, who furiously denied that his officers were practicing any favoritism and insisted the police were doing a fine job of enforcing the law with an even hand.7
As spring crept toward summer, tension between the races in East St. Louis tightened even more, like a powerful spring under increasing pressure. At Fifteenth Street and Boismenue Avenue in Denverside, a neighborhood blacks had been moving into in recent years, three white national guardsmen in their summer dress khakis overpowered a city detective, stole his service revolver, and went on a rampage. They already were carrying Army 45s, and with their impressive arsenal they robbed three black men at gunpoint and wrecked a saloon in a black neighborhood after drinking a considerable amount of the whiskey on hand. Outside the saloon, they were subdued by police and national guardsmen before, as the Journal put it, “They started a race riot.” The three young men were said to be from wealthy Springfield, Illinois, families.8
At the beginning of the last week in June, attorney Maurice V. Joyce introduced a resolution to the chamber of commerce urging companies to stop importing blacks to East St. Louis and calling on city officials to “employ every legitimate means to prevent the influx of negroes into East St. Louis, and thereby take every precaution against crime, riot and disorder.” The resolution was tabled.9
As attacks on blacks increased, a committee of blacks headed by Dr. Leroy Bundy went to the mayor again asking for help. Once again, the mayor tried to calm them, saying things were not as bad as they thought. On June 28, the aluminum workers’ strike whimpered to an end. The number of pickets had dwindled, at times, to a handful. A union spokesman said the strike was being called off for “patriotic” reasons. Very few of the strikers were ever rehired.10
Meanwhile, as the Post-Dispatch’s relentless Paul Y. Anderson reported, East St. Louis had once ag
ain stopped enforcing Sunday closing laws as well as the ordinances against prostitution and gambling. After the Reverend George W. Allison, a source for Anderson’s stories, complained to Mayor Mollman about growing lawlessness, the minister was summoned to a meeting with Mollman and political baron Locke Tarlton at city hall. Mollman shut the door to his office and the three men talked for three quarters of an hour. Allison said he felt that he had been betrayed after working hard to get Mollman elected, and, his anger building, mentioned by name a bar owner who was illegally open on Sunday, selling drinks and, it appeared, the services of prostitutes. Allison said he had confronted the man and told him he was going to report his activities to the mayor, and the man had laughed and said the mayor already knew all about it and had no intention of honoring his campaign promise to enforce Sunday closing laws.
Tarlton sighed deeply and said, “Reverend, the trouble about it is, the damn city is just like it has always been.” The mayor heaved himself out of his well-cushioned desk chair and said, “Locke, you don’t mean that?”
Tarlton replied, “Yes, mayor, it is just like it has always been.”
“Why Locke,” said the mayor, “didn’t I run those penitentiary birds out from the rear of the police station here?”
Tarlton laughed and said, “Yes, mayor, you ran them out of here, but they are still in town. Your old friends are all here, mayor, they are all here.”
And Mollman, his long, thin face and balding scalp turning red from barely stifled laughter, sat back down and said, “Well, I’ll be damned if I don’t believe I’ll join the Third Artillery and go to France.” Tarlton and Mollman shared a long, hearty laugh.
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