Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Allison, a tough, righteous Texan who had seen a lot of sin in his life, ended the meeting by telling Tarlton he had five days to close down one particularly notorious “hotel” or Allison and his supporters would shut the place down themselves and nail the door shut so no business of any kind could be conducted there for a year. “If you don’t clean this town and get rid of this idle thug crowd you’ve got here,” he said, “you will have a riot here one of these days and that little thing you had in May will not be a patching.”11

  As summer arrived, East St. Louisans stayed in the streets later and later. Even without daylight savings time, darkness didn’t fall until about eight o’clock, and by then the temperature had usually gone down to the low eighties. Holdups increased, and so did assaults on blacks. But blacks in East St. Louis had not retaliated for the frequent attacks on them.

  On Sunday, July 1, the temperature hit ninety-one degrees at ten in the morning, and hovered around ninety until late afternoon, typical of a summer day in East St. Louis. The air was blanketed with moisture, as usual. The coming together of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the two largest river systems in America, cranks up the humidity that hangs palpably in the miasmic summer air of St. Louis and East St. Louis.

  Out-of-work white men had taken to hanging out near the eastern end of the Free Bridge, harassing blacks verbally and sometimes shoving and hitting them. The crowd of whites was larger than usual that Sunday, perhaps in anticipation of the Fourth of July. The whites drank, boasted, and flourished guns—many East St. Louisans of both races routinely fired guns into the air in lieu of fireworks to celebrate the Fourth. Some blacks who were unlucky enough to be caught alone at the East St. Louis end of the Free Bridge were beaten. Reports of the beatings quickly spread to the black neighborhoods a few blocks away, adding strength to a rumor that whites planned on killing everyone—men, women, and children—at a black Fourth of July celebration in a city park in the South End. A similar rumor—blacks were planning to attack white Independence Day festivities—spread among whites.

  The Free Bridge facing east

  About seven o’clock Sunday evening, in a South End neighborhood near Tenth and Bond Avenue—the intersection near the approach to the Free Bridge was a focus of black street life—a black man was attacked by roving whites. He pulled a gun and fired, possibly wounding one of his attackers. The story of the shooting, much magnified by rumor, made its way into both the black and the white communities. Shortly after that, a black woman in the same neighborhood ran crying hysterically onto Eleventh Street, where a group of black men stood at a corner waiting for the cool of the evening finally to descend. The woman screamed that she had been attacked by three white men a block to the west. “Let’s go to Tenth Street,” a black man shouted.12

  About the same time, black plainclothes policeman John Eubanks reported to duty at police headquarters and saw a white railroad security officer with three men in custody—two white, one black. “I want them booked,” the security officer told the police lieutenant in charge. “This negro was running and these two white men were running after him up the railroad tracks.” It turned out the two white men had been in the vanguard of a mob of fifty or more chasing the black man through rail yards near the Free Bridge. The lieutenant asked the white prisoners what had happened and they said the black man had insulted them and they had hit him in retaliation and he had taken off running. The lieutenant told the black man to go home and ordered that the two white men be held and booked. Normally, a booked suspect was held at least overnight, but Eubanks checked later and found out the white men were released and back on the street by ten thirty P.M.13

  A little after nine P.M., a veteran black policeman named W. H. Mills finished a relatively uneventful twelve-hour shift in the northern part of downtown and took a streetcar out to Seventeenth and Bond on his way home. A couple of black men he knew asked him what the trouble was downtown. None that he knew of, said Mills. One of the men said with agitation, “Why, two colored women just came by and said that the white folks down at Tenth Street and the Free Bridge were rocking every nigger they could see.” Mills gathered some details and ran across the street to a garage that had recently been opened by Dr. Leroy Bundy, who operated several small businesses in the neighborhood, and used the telephone to call police headquarters. He reported that whites, some of them drunk, were attacking blacks and pulling them from automobiles around Tenth and Bond. Then he walked to his home on Market Avenue and went to bed.14

  Later that evening, nearby on Bond at Nineteenth Street, the day’s last services ended at St. John American Methodist Episcopalian Zion Church. A bishop from St. Louis had given a guest sermon. Dr. Thomas G. Hunter, who lived across the street from the church, saw the bishop outside the church and offered to drive him back to St. Louis. Two other men, a minister named Oscar Wallace and a teamster named Calvin Cotton, came along for protection: Hunter had heard of the attacks near the Free Bridge, and he was concerned for the bishop’s safety. While they were across the river, they found out later, a black Model T Ford full of white men had sped through their neighborhood firing into houses. The streets in that part of town were unpaved or in poor condition, and Model T Fords have minimal suspension systems, so the car would have bounded down the street from pothole to pothole, with the men firing wildly, unable to aim. But if the purpose was intimidation, it didn’t really matter what they hit—homes, cars, people.

  They also found out that some of the men who had lingered in front of the AME church, holding on to the evening, heard the shots about a block away and went home and got their guns.

  Hunter, Cotton, and Wallace made the trip back and forth across the river without incident, and returned to the neighborhood after eleven thirty. A couple of blocks southeast of the AME church, Dr. Hunter stopped at Twentieth Street near Market to let Cotton off at his house. As they were standing on the street, chatting about the evening, a black automobile—Hunter could not ascertain the make—sped up from the south on Twentieth Street with its lights out, made a screaming left turn, and headed west on Market. As it accelerated, men leaned out of both sides of the open car and fired into the houses on either side of Market.15

  At his home at 1914 Market, black lawyer N. W. Parden was awakened by a fusillade of gunshots that sounded “like firecrackers popping.” He ran out into the yard in his pajamas in time to see a carload of white men firing with pistols. Then he heard the crack of rifle fire and the boom of shotguns. Although he could barely see anyone in the shadows, it was clear from the flashes of light from either side of the street that blacks along Market Street were returning fire. The white men stopped shooting as the car sped west into the darkness.

  Parden’s next-door neighbor, policeman W. H. Mills, was exhausted from his long shift and was pulled from a deep sleep by the gunfire from the street. Urged by his wife to get out of bed and see what was going on, he ran to the front door. Parden was standing in the front yard with a pistol in his hand, and a young man named Harry Sanders who lived nearby shouted that a car had gone through full of men shooting guns—“a gang of white fellows,” Sanders said.16

  Mills immediately thought of the brutal beatings of blacks on May 28, and the fires that had been set. He was worried about his wife—she was sick in bed—and he was afraid she wouldn’t have the strength to escape if a mob of whites attacked. He wasn’t sure what to do, but finally he went back in the house and lay down next to his wife. A bit later, he heard what sounded like a gun battle somewhere in the direction of downtown, but the carload of nightriders did not return to his neighborhood—probably got scared off, he thought, with some satisfaction—and he finally drifted into a fitful sleep.17

  A block away on Bond, Dr. Hunter and Reverend Wallace, who were next-door neighbors, were too jittery to go to bed so they sat on Hunter’s darkened front porch and waited nervously to see if anything else happened. A little after midnight they saw flashes of light from the west, toward downtown, and heard a long,
sustained volley of shots. For a moment, it sounded as if a war had started. Then the firing stopped, and left an ominous hole in the night. They went into their houses and locked the doors.18

  Shortly before midnight, police began receiving reports that armed black men were assembling in the South End. Night police chief Con Hickey was on the phone talking to one of the callers when another line rang and cub reporter Roy Albertson of the St. Louis Republic picked up the receiver. A grocer named James Reidy, who lived on Eighteenth Street south of Bond Avenue, said more than a hundred armed blacks had gathered in his neighborhood, summoned by a church bell. “It’s ringing now,” the grocer said. “If you listen, you can hear it.”19

  Albertson, who was only eighteen years old, couldn’t hear any bell. But he sensed a story, particularly after the grocer—thinking he was talking to a policeman—added, “If you get some men down here right away you can disperse them before there is trouble.” Albertson passed the report on to Con Hickey. Earlier phone calls reporting blacks being beaten and shot at and pulled out of their cars by whites had elicited little or no official reaction, but this time it sounded like the long-rumored armed black rebellion had finally begun. Hickey told two plainclothes detectives, Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wodley, to “get out there and see what’s going on.”20

  Coppedge, who was playing gin rummy with Robert Boylan, a Globe-Democrat reporter, laid down his cards and he and Wodley headed to their assigned car, an unmarked, black Model T Ford. The Ford was just like at least one other car that had recently driven through black neighborhoods in the South End carrying white gunmen firing into homes. Wodley and Coppedge were hoping to get their business over with by one thirty A.M., when their shift ended and they could go home. Albertson asked Coppedge if he could ride along. The detective nodded.

  The two detectives, in summer suits and straw hats, sat in the front with the driver, police chauffeur William Hutter. The forty-nine-year-old Coppedge, a sergeant, was next to the door. His twenty-nine-year-old partner, Wodley, sat in the middle. Two uniformed policemen, Oscar Hobbs and Patrick Cullinane, sat in back. The top was up. The car was crowded with bulky men, and Roy Albertson stood on the running board on the driver’s side, holding on to the door. The farther they got from the heart of downtown, the fewer streetlights broke the darkness. The temperature had dipped into the upper seventies, although the high humidity persevered, as usual.21

  The police car headed east to Tenth and then turned south through a predominantly black area close to white neighborhoods. As the police car reached Tenth and Bond, the driver slammed on the brakes to avoid plowing into a mob of black men who were dimly lit by the weak headlights of the Ford. The mob parted as the car came to a halt, and most of the men ended up on the sidewalk near the passenger side of the car, where Coppedge sat. There was no streetlight within fifty feet of that spot.22

  Albertson later recalled that, in the dim light, he could see that the black men were heavily armed with revolvers and automatic pistols, rifles and shotguns. Some held large sticks or clubs. There were 125 to 150 of them, Albertson said, mostly young men, some in their teens. The men, it turned out, were headed toward the Free Bridge, where several white men working at a service station had beaten a black man with no apparent provocation. But Albertson and the police did not know that.

  Albertson, Cullinane, Hutter, and Hobbs all later testified that Coppedge identified himself as a policeman and exchanged words with the men. In Albertson’s version of the confrontation, Coppedge yelled out the window, “What’s doing here, boys?” and someone shouted in reply, “None of your damn business.” Coppedge said, “Well, we’re down here to protect you fellows as well as the whites. We are police officers.” Someone shouted at Coppedge, “We don’t need any of your damn protection,” and the crowd began guffawing.23

  Coppedge, according to Albertson, turned to the driver and said quietly, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The driver put the Ford in gear but he hadn’t traveled more than a few feet when there was a loud, explosive pop. Albertson was not sure if one of the tires had blown—tires were always blowing on Model T Fords—or if someone in the crowd had fired a shot. In any event, Albertson said, the explosion triggered a volley from the black men. The front tires blew flat, then the rear ones, and the bullets kept coming, punching into the metal with loud clangs and pops, shattering the windshield and plowing into the flesh of three of the men in the car. “It looked like they turned loose and tried to empty their guns as fast as they could,” said Albertson, who threw himself down on the wide running board on the driver’s side away from the gunfire as soon as he heard the first bullet. One or more of the policemen may have fired back, but without apparent effect.

  The startled driver jammed his foot down on the gas pedal and drove hard into the middle of the crowd, banging men aside as he pushed east down a long dark block of Bond Avenue, running on his rims, with sparks striking from the pavement and metal howling. By the time he had driven to Eleventh Street and the next streetlight, the shooting had stopped. The driver slowed briefly, looked to his right, and said, “Sam is shot.” Coppedge had taken a bullet to his jugular vein and died almost immediately in a spurt of dark blood.24

  Coppedge’s partner, Wodley, had been shot in the abdomen, probably more than once, and he was moaning with pain, critically wounded. He died two days later. Hobbs, on the right side in back, had been hit in the right arm. The other uniformed policeman, like Albertson and the driver, remained unhurt. The driver headed for Deaconess Hospital, only four blocks away at Fifteenth and Bond. Just before he got there, he passed a fire station, and Albertson told him to slow down. The reporter hopped off the running board and ran in to call police headquarters.25

  Albertson’s call came into the police station at about twelve twenty-five A.M. He reported to Con Hickey that Coppedge was almost certainly dead, and Wodley was gut-shot and dying. And he said a mob of black men, “armed with everything in the way of portable firearms,” was heading for downtown. The general feeling around the police station, Boylan recalled, was that the mob had already killed a couple of policemen, and they were heading for the station to kill some more. Instead of rushing out to confront the mob, the handful of police on duty at that hour on a Monday morning stayed at the station to protect it and the adjoining city hall. Hickey called Mayor Fred Mollman, who was already awake. A machinist named Fred Peleate had called him about twelve thirty to report that a policeman had been shot on Bond Avenue near his house. The mayor got dressed and headed downtown.26

  Meanwhile, on Missouri Avenue about a block from the police station, at the YMCA, director W. A. Miller was awakened by the sound of a car skidding to a stop in front of the Commercial Hotel across the street. The hotel, saloon, brothel, and boardinghouse for hoodlums was managed for New York absentee landlords by political moguls Thomas Canavan and Locke Tarlton, and its denizens enjoyed a considerable amount of official protection.

  Miller got up and went to the window in time to see four white men get out of the car. Two of them stood on the street, pacing back and forth, apparently looking for someone. One of them was walking strangely, as if he had a hurt leg. The other two ran quickly into the hotel. In a moment, another car drove up, with bullet holes in the radiator and the rear. The driver and passengers, Miller recalled later, “looked like a bunch of outlaws. I gathered [from their conversation] that they had been driving through that section of town where the policeman had been shot, and they were fired on by Negroes.”27

  Mayor Mollman arrived at the police station between one and one thirty A.M. Boylan was standing out front, between the police station and the downtown fire station, nervously scanning Main Street for the black mob he had heard was coming. Mollman got out of his car and walked up. He said, “Looks awful bad, don’t it?”

  “Yes, it does,” said Boylan.

  “Do you think we’re going to have trouble?”

  “Yes, but you better talk to Roy. Albertson was in the machine and got firs
t-hand information and he can tell you better than I can, but it looks bad to me.”28

  By then, Albertson had arrived back at the police station, and he joined Mollman and Boylan on the sidewalk. He gave the mayor a quick summary of what he had seen and said, “As soon as these morning papers get on the streets in East St. Louis you’re going to have trouble. As quick as people find Coppedge has been killed and Wodley is dying … there’s going to be trouble around here. You had better get the troops. You had 600 or 700 soldiers down here on May 28 for that riot. It will take double that number to even try to handle what is going to turn loose today.”

  Albertson may have been trying to goad the mayor into saying something interesting, something quotable. The reporter had a two A.M. deadline to get his stories into the St. Louis Republic, a morning paper that was due to hit the streets by five A.M. But Mollman did not say a word. Albertson ran inside the police station and called the Republic, dictating his first-person account to a rewrite man. It would, of course, be the main front-page turn story that morning.29

  Boylan had a similar deadline for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and his main morning competitor knew a lot more about what had just happened than Boylan did, so he tried another tack. “All right, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “come on over to my office where you can be quiet and we’ll work the telephones.” That way he could listen to the mayor’s calls.

  “Well,” Mollman replied, after a moment of thought, “I might as well go to my own office.” Boylan nodded. The mayor left to make some calls. Mollman tried several numbers in Springfield and got no answer before he reached Dick Shinn, an assistant to the adjutant general of the Illinois National Guard. Shinn had been in East St. Louis during the May riot, and he had kept in touch with the situation, although he had been assured by Mayor Mollman that things had settled down. Shinn began calling National Guard officers in towns all over southern Illinois, telling them to assemble troops and head for East St. Louis. By then, off-duty policemen had been called in, and there were about a dozen uniformed patrolmen and several plainclothes detectives—all white—waiting inside the station for police chief Ransom Payne to tell them what to do. More were on the way.