Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  A call came in that a mob of whites had assembled in front of a chili parlor a block or so away, on Collinsville Avenue. Some of the men had been drinking, working up the nerve to storm a nearby building and wreck the dental office of Dr. Leroy Bundy. There was a light on in the window of what they thought was his office, and finally the mob surged across the street, led by a couple of army enlistees who were waiting to be sent to basic training. One of them had a rifle, and he led the crowd up to the second floor and smashed the butt through the opaque glass door to Bundy’s office. There was no one there, but an electric fan was running and a light was on, so they decided the dentist must be nearby and began searching the building. They found no one. A few policemen walked over and broke up the crowd, but some of the men were reluctant to go home. So a small gang milled around in front of the police station for hours, waiting for something to happen.30

  At about two in the morning, a neighbor with a telephone knocked on the door of John Eubanks, a black policeman who lived on St. Louis Avenue just north of downtown East St. Louis. She told Eubanks that a policeman had called and asked that he come to the station at once. The woman was unclear about what the trouble was. Eubanks quickly dressed and headed on foot for the police station, just a few minutes away. When he got there and saw a surly crowd of whites milling around in front of the station, he pulled out his badge and pushed his way through, ignoring the curses and threats and racial epithets.

  There were about seventy policemen on the East St. Louis force, six of them black. The blacks all worked in plainclothes, perhaps on the theory that a black man in a uniform would offend or outrage the white majority. Inside the station, Eubanks noticed that most of the white policemen were there, but none of the other blacks. A lieutenant told him, with great agitation, “John, Coppedge was killed a short time ago, Sergeant Coppedge. Down in the South End, at Eleventh and Bond.” Eubanks was shocked and saddened. Coppedge was married with a couple of children, one of them now a young soldier training in Florida to fight in the Great War.

  “How did it happen?” asked Eubanks.

  “He was killed by an armed crowd of Negroes,” was the reply.

  “Well, we better get on down in there, hadn’t we?” said Eubanks.

  “No, no,” said the lieutenant. “Wait until your boss comes in. I have sent a machine [an automobile] out for the chief of detectives, and he will be here in a few minutes.” Chief of police Ransom Payne was there, too, but he said nothing to Eubanks.

  Chief of detectives Anthony Stocker arrived a few minutes later. Eu-banks went up to him but was waved away, and Stocker and Payne went into the chief’s office. The two men spoke heatedly about something, and Eu-banks sensed through the office window that he was among the topics of conversation. At one point, the mayor walked in and joined the discussion. Finally, the chief came out of his office.

  “What are we going to do?” Eubanks asked impatiently.

  Chief Payne spoke very carefully, watching for Eubanks’s reaction. “Owing to the circumstances,” he said, “it is not safe to attempt to go down in there now with the little handful of men we have. It seems there is a very large body of Negroes armed in there, and it isn’t safe for us to go in.” And that, it seemed, was that. Eubanks was dismayed, but he stopped himself from asking why they had called him in the first place. He walked back home to try and catch a few hours of sleep. He figured he would be busy later that day.31

  At about three in the morning, in Springfield, Illinois, Dick Shinn of the Illinois adjutant general’s office phoned National Guard colonel Stephen Orville Tripp. He asked Tripp to come over to his office immediately. Tripp put on a summer suit rather than his colonel’s uniform and hurried to the adjutant general’s office. Tripp was the assistant quartermaster general for the Illinois National Guard, a slight man of late middle age who had been a deputy United States marshal, a policeman, and a deputy sheriff—as well as a lumberyard foreman. One man in the state capital who had seen him in action said sarcastically, “Tripp is an excellent man as an office clerk.”32

  Shinn told him that a policeman was dead in East St. Louis and the situation had the makings of a riot. Several National Guard units had been contacted and would be arriving in the city in a few hours. Tripp would be in command of them. Less than two hours later—still in his business suit and carrying only a briefcase—Tripp was on the train to East St. Louis with orders to meet with the mayor and cooperate with him “in the matter of enforcing the law.”33

  About four thirty A.M., Earl Jimmerson, the East St. Louis labor leader who was also a member of the county board of supervisors, was awakened by a phone call. It was a white woman he knew in the South End, and she told Jimmerson that Coppedge was dead. Coppedge had been a friend, and Jimmerson was stunned. He went downstairs and opened the front door and was a little surprised to see that the St. Louis Republic had already been delivered.34 It was as if it had been rushed into print, and he would later realize that the paper’s error-ridden stories reflected that haste. He picked up the paper, went back inside, and turned on a lamp. The story was spread across the front page:

  POLICEMAN KILLED, 5 SHOT IN E. ST. LOUIS RIOT

  NEGROES, CALLED OUT BY RINGING OF CHURCH BELL, FIRE WHEN POLICE APPEAR

  OUTBREAK FOLLOWS BEATING OF WATCHMAN BY BLACK SATURDAY NIGHT

  Roy Albertson’s first-person account of the fatal shooting of Coppedge reported that the “pre-arranged signal” for the armed blacks to gather was the ringing of a church bell at an African American Methodist Church at Sixteenth and Boismenue Avenue, deep in the South End and six blocks south of Bond Avenue. There was no mention of a carload of whites, much less two carloads, speeding through black neighborhoods firing out the windows. The story said, “What caused this latest break on the part of the blacks cannot be told now. There was no trouble of a serious nature in the black belt today. The only trouble came early Saturday night, when a railroad watchman was man-handled by a negro, who escaped.”

  At the top of the story, in bold type, was a list of five men wounded the night before. Among the wounded, identified as a patrolman, was a man named Gus Masserang. The story said Masserang was shot in the leg, which was true—he was hit many times in the legs, the back, and the neck with shotgun pellets—although the wounds were superficial. However, he was not a policeman but a petty crook who was known to hang out at the Commercial Hotel in downtown East St. Louis.

  There were numerous other mistakes in the story, many of them tending to cast a favorable light on the police, who were credited with a whirlwind of activity in the South End when in reality they had stayed close to the station after the shootings of Coppedge and Wodley.35

  Although Albertson’s story reported that Coppedge had identified himself and his companions as police officers, the St. Louis Argus—after interviews with African Americans in the South End following the riot—contended that there had been no exchange of words at all before the shooting. The black weekly reported that the policemen in the unmarked police car were “mistaken for rioters” making another attack on the neighborhood, and “the Negroes immediately fired upon” the black Ford, “thinking this was another machine with lawless occupants whose purpose was to repeat the act of the preceding one.”36

  On the morning of July 2, a black Model T Ford shot full of holes sat next to the Commercial Hotel. Very few East St. Louisans took notice of that particular machine. Most of the interest focused on another black Model T Ford riddled with bullet holes, all four of its tires flat and shredded, that was parked a block or so away, across the street from the police station.

  CHAPTER 8

  The July Riot Begins

  When Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch arrived in downtown East St. Louis at eight A.M. July 2, seventy-five or a hundred white men were standing on the street and sidewalks in front of city hall and the police station, loudly cursing blacks and vowing revenge for the attack on the police. Their attention was focused on the black Model T Ford w
ith flat tires and smashed headlights that sat across Main Street from the station. Anderson pushed through the mob to get a closer look. Blood was splashed across the front seat and bullets had punched holes all along the body of the car.1

  Anderson, who was twenty-four, had been assigned to the East St. Louis beat about three years before. He moved to the small city to get to know it better, and the corruption he discovered astounded and infuriated him. A superb and tenacious reporter, the feisty son of a tough Tennessee marble quarryman, Anderson was not afraid to write about what he knew, nor, like some of his older colleagues, had he surrendered to the fatalistic view that nothing he wrote would make a bit of difference. Banned from the city hall-police station complex on Main Street because of his muckraking stories, Anderson now worked out of the Post-Dispatch offices in a building nearby. But he was not afraid to walk into city hall or the police station and pin down a public servant until someone made him leave. He was stubborn and bold, but not a fool. In the spring of 1917, after persistent threats on his life, he moved back to St. Louis. He continued to cover East St. Louis.

  Anderson was emotionally erratic, tough but brittle, given to bitter moods but refusing to sink into the cynicism so many of his colleagues used as protection against the harsh imperfections of the world of city politics. He found another escape. Anderson was already drinking heavily, which was hardly unusual in the newspaper business for most of the twentieth century, but he went about it with a relentless lack of joy. He was relentless in his reporting, too, and in a few years he would win the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Teapot Dome scandal and would be one of the best-known correspondents in Washington.2

  That July morning, Anderson stood with a couple of other reporters and watched the crowd of white men gathered around the bullet-shattered, blood-stained Ford grow larger and more belligerent. Some of the men had heard about the shootings when leaving saloons early in the morning, and had not been to bed. Some were still drinking, clutching brown paper bags or openly sharing bare brown bottles.

  A well-dressed man named John Seymour, one of a group of lawyers who hung around the city buildings looking for clients, approached the mob and said he would be happy to defend anyone who would “avenge the murders of the two policemen.” The crowd cheered. Policemen standing nearby bantered with the angry white men, and it became apparent to bystanders that they were making it clear, intentionally or not, that they would do nothing that day to stop white men from killing blacks.

  Another reporter, A. B. Hendry of the small St. Louis Star, arrived at the police station about that time. He had just finished driving through black neighborhoods and described the mood as “a general gala day among the blacks.” Hendry regaled his colleagues and police with fanciful stories of blacks playing banjoes and singing, celebrating the uprising. The white mob hanging around the car on Main Street heard the stories and grew even angrier. Reporters hurried to the phones and called their offices, warning that trouble was coming and asking for legmen to help cover it.3

  Police told reporters that they suspected that Dr. Leroy Bundy had, in the words of the St. Louis Republic, “inflamed the negroes and formed the mob which killed policeman Coppedge.” Police were searching for Bundy, who could not be found. The East St. Louis Daily Journal speculated that he had “left the city.”4

  Colonel Stephen Orville Tripp, who was supposed to be in command of the National Guard troops expected momentarily, finally made it to the East St. Louis city hall about eight A.M. His train had arrived at the downtown depot about seven A.M., but he apparently had not heard the conductor announce the stop and had stayed on the train as it crossed the wide river and rolled into downtown St. Louis. When he discovered his mistake, he caught a local streetcar back into Illinois. Tripp was fifty-six years old, a quartermaster—essentially a military storekeeper—with little experience in commanding troops and not much of a knack for it. Tripp had enlisted in the Illinois National Guard at the age of eighteen, and had become a cavalry officer in the army in the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century, but most of his military career had been in the quartermaster corps of the National Guard, in charge of supplies. At the time of the riot, he was assistant quartermaster general of the Illinois Guard.5

  Robert Boylan of the Globe-Democrat, a former soldier, met the colonel shortly after he had finally found his way to East St. Louis, and sized him up immediately. “Colonel Tripp was not in uniform. He wore an ordinary business suit and was one of the most lady-like officers I ever saw. He was a perfect gentleman, so far as he talked with me, but soldiers need to be told, they need to be pointed out. I saw him daily when he was here, several times a day, and I never saw him with any insignia of his rank. He wore a dark gray business suit.” Other witnesses said the gray summer-weight suit was seersucker, decidedly informal battle gear for a commanding officer soon to be in harm’s way. They reported that Tripp tried to give orders to troops and push his way into the middle of enraged mobs with a banded straw boater perched on the top of his head.6

  Tripp found the mayor and the police chief in city hall and identified himself, telling Mayor Mollman he was in town “for the purpose of cooperating with him in the matter of enforcing law.” The mayor replied that he was not feeling well, and probably would not be much help. Mollman was uncommonly pale, his blue eyes were watery, and he seemed surprisingly inattentive, as if his mind was elsewhere. Mollman added that he had been “advised not to go out in the open.” Because Mollman had courted black leaders and had taken the bulk of the black vote in his two successful campaigns for mayor, he and some of his advisers were afraid he would be attacked by vengeful whites—like the mob growing on the street outside, staring in fury at the bloody wreck of an automobile at the curb and cursing blacks. For most of the day, the mayor stayed indoors.7

  Mollman said he would designate Thomas L. Fekete, the young acting city attorney, as his representative. And before retiring into his office, the mayor told Tripp that troops should be positioned on several key streets—Market, Walnut, and out front on Main. Fekete seemed full of pep, ready to do whatever was needed.8 About that time, another high-ranking military officer arrived at the city hall command post. Lieutenant Colonel E. P. Clayton of the Illinois National Guard’s Fourth Infantry had been visiting St. Louis and had read about the riot in that morning’s papers. He, too, was in civilian clothes, but immediately called for his uniform to be sent from Springfield. Clayton had much more experience at commanding troops, and he had been in charge of closing down the May 28 riot. But Tripp outranked him.

  There is a great deal of confusion about who was actually in charge of the troops in East St. Louis on July 2. Tripp recalled later that he had told Clayton, “Assume command of the military organizations upon their arrival and co-operate with the mayor in all matters for the enforcement of law.” But Clayton said Tripp personally took command of the troops and made decisions on the movement of men without consulting or even informing Clayton. Other observers insisted that the chain of command was never clear, and Clayton himself was overheard at the height of the riot to complain that he could do nothing because his authority had been “superseded” by Tripp.9

  Young attorney Thomas Fekete, the mayor’s designated representative, seems to have been in a similar position to Clayton. He was given lots of responsibility (and the potential for lots of blame) but very little actual power. Essentially, no one was in charge in East St. Louis but the rioters.

  Illinois national guardsmen began arriving shortly before nine A.M., beginning with Company G, at about half-strength with three officers and twenty-seven men.10 “They came as they could,” Roy Albertson recalled. “They didn’t come fully equipped as soldiers. Some were in overalls, some merely brought their rifles… They weren’t organized in any way, they were just raw recruits, farmer’s boys. And what they saw that day just overwhelmed them—amazed them.”11

  Crates of ammunition arrived all day by train, and they were unloaded and stacked to the ceiling in vacan
t offices in city hall and the police station. By evening, there were dozens of crates of bullets in the city hall complex, and dozens more at the army camp northeast of downtown, at Tenth Street and St. Louis Avenue. Most of the soldiers had loaded rifles or at least cartridge belts with bullets in them, and most soldiers had bayonets affixed to their rifles, even if they didn’t have full military uniforms. “They could have quelled the riot with bayonets alone if they had wanted to,” an observer remarked.12

  Calvin Cotton, a black teamster who attended the AME church at Nineteenth and Bond and had seen the white men in the Ford shoot up his neighborhood the night before, was downtown about nine in the morning chatting about the incident with a friend, when a large, muscular white man walked over and stood practically on Cotton’s toes, listening to what the black men were saying. Cotton and his friend stopped talking and stepped back. A policeman came around the corner, and the big white man said to him, “You better get these niggers off the street, because we’re going to kill every one of them in a minute.” Cotton recognized the white man, but couldn’t recall his name. Later, he identified him as Richard Brockway, a security guard for the streetcar company.

  Brockway, a strong, bulky man in his mid-forties, was well known as a tough guy and a brawler. The policeman listened to Brockway rail for a minute or two, threatening to kill blacks if they didn’t get off the street immediately, and then he just turned and walked away.