Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Cotton quickly crossed the street to a real estate office. About ten minutes later, he heard shooting. He went to the window of the real estate office and saw a black man lying on the sidewalk near where Brockway had been standing. He wasn’t moving. Brockway had disappeared. Cotton walked quickly out the side door, which opened onto Main Street, and caught a streetcar across the river to St. Louis.13

  Brockway had gone to a meeting at the Labor Temple. He and several hundred other angry whites met for about an hour. Fairly quickly, control of the meeting was taken by Brockway. The security guard and a few like-minded men stirred up the crowd with inflammatory speeches, calling for whites to form a “home protective league” to defend themselves and, if necessary, to strike out at blacks. He recommended that everyone go home immediately after the meeting, get a gun, and come back downtown, ready for battle.14

  Black plainclothes policeman W. H. Mills read about the shooting of Coppedge and Wodley in the morning papers and went to police headquarters. Mills and his partner, W. Green, were at the station when a report came in by telephone. “They were killing a Negro up on Illinois and Collinsville Avenue,” Mills recalled. Mills and Green were sent out to the South End to “instruct all the Negroes to stay off the streets” and then go home and look after their families. The other four black policemen were told the same thing. By late morning, there were no black policemen—and very few white ones—on the streets of East St. Louis.15

  Earl Jimmerson, the labor leader and county supervisor, also came downtown that morning and was horrified to see the shattered and blood-spattered police car across from city hall. He found the mayor and the police chief inside the city hall complex and said, “If I was you fellows, I would move that Ford away from in front of the police station. Take it some place where people can’t see it.” Eventually, the city officials took his advice, but by then thousands of East St. Louisans had seen the car and absorbed its enraging message.16

  Walking across the street to a cigar store in the Illmo Hotel, Jimmerson encountered a porter he knew—”a very nice little colored fellow, got a family,” he later recalled.

  “Herb,” Jimmerson said, “if I was you I would take my family and go across the river. It looks like trouble here.”

  The young man replied, “Mr. Jimmerson, I haven’t got any money to go across the river and no place to take them when I get over there.”

  “Well, go over and get under a bridge if you have to,” Jimmerson said.

  A crowd of white men walked by, talking angrily and cursing blacks. The porter drew back into the shadows and watched them for a moment and then, when they had passed, he slipped away.

  The Reverend George W. Allison was in a lawyer’s office on the fifth floor of the Metropolitan Building on Missouri Avenue when he heard shots. He hurried to the window. Two or three black men in overalls had been working on the streetcar tracks, but they dropped their tools and began to walk quickly away. A mob of white men was rushing toward them. A black man was grabbed and attacked, but he broke free and ran. Allison rushed to the mayor’s office a few blocks away. He told Mollman trouble was coming, suggested he deputize Allison and eight or ten other good men, and they would go grab the whites who were making trouble and shut them up in city hall. “Tell them, ‘The first man that comes down these stairs will get killed in his tracks,’ and you will break this thing up.”

  But the mayor said he would rather wait for the National Guard to deal with the problems.17

  By ten o’clock, several dozen national guardsmen had been scattered around downtown. Reporter G. E. Popkess of the East St. Louis Daily Journal talked to a few on Main Street near city hall and they all said the same thing, “We have no orders.” As he was talking to the group, one of the militiamen broke away and strolled over to a white man standing nearby, on the edge of a loud mob clearly waiting for something to happen. In a conversational tone, the militiaman asked, “Got your nigger yet?”

  The white man grinned and replied, “I’ll get mine by sundown today, I guarantee you that.”18

  At the Labor Temple, someone—it may have been Richard Brockway—got the crowd growling with angry assent by saying he had lived in the South, where they knew how to deal with uppity blacks. The meeting broke up when Brockway shouted, “We’re going to get some niggers today,” and strode out of the building to loud cheers. Most of the men went home, some to hunker down and try to stay out of trouble, others to get their guns, but a couple of dozen followed Brockway down the steps and into the street. As the small mob moved south, a black man got in the way and stumbled to the ground. Brockway pulled out a pistol and shot him, pumping the trigger five times as if to be sure the man was dead.19

  Another black man got in the way, and several white men grabbed him, but someone from the crowd yelled, “Let him go. He’s just an old barbershop nigger.” The white men left the old black man lying half-conscious on the sidewalk.

  By then, the streetcars that ran every few minutes down Broadway and across the Eads Bridge for St. Louis were packed with blacks, and blacks who were unable to jam themselves onto the cars began walking south and west through the perilous downtown, toward the Free Bridge. Several dozen men in the white mob near city hall joined the gang from the Labor Temple, and they all began marching raggedly down the middle of Collinsville Avenue south toward Broadway and the main east-west streetcar line. When they reached the streetcar stop, they smashed their way in the doors of the cars, pushing in against the weight of the mass of black bodies until the doors crumpled and they could drag people out. One black man was shot almost immediately. Others were beaten unconscious, or kicked and smashed with huge paving stones until their heads were bloody and pulped. Whites stood and watched and cheered as each black man or woman was pulled from a car and hurled to the ground.20

  Blacks fleeing East St. Louis

  The white onlookers, said one observer, “were in good humor,” as if they were “waiting for a circus parade.” Fewer than one hundred white men were actually attacking blacks, and most of them, according to later testimony, were “bar-flies” and petty criminals, but as word got around town, the crowd of onlookers along Broadway grew to thousands of people—all of them white. The riot was under way. Some onlookers cheered the rioters on, but most of the mob that packed downtown just watched, their silence and lack of interference—as in most race riots—seeming to give the mob encouragement to do its worst. At first, a few whites tried to stop the beatings, at least with words, but men booed and cursed and women hissed through their teeth and in some cases stabbed out with hatpins or penknives until the peacemakers gave up.21

  The riot moved across downtown East St. Louis with startling swiftness, like a fire on a wind-blown prairie. At least three black men were already dead from bullets or beatings and several others critically wounded by ten fifteen A.M. when a white man was killed, the first since Coppedge, in an accident that typifies all the things that can go wrong in the blur of a riot. A drunken white man shot at a black man in front of the Illmo Hotel on Collinsville Avenue. The bullet either missed the black man entirely or passed through his body and killed a white man standing behind him. A policeman, one of the few in evidence, ran over and grabbed the wobbly shooter before he killed anybody else. He started to drag him off to jail and a large crowd shouted to turn him loose. The crowd pressed in closer and became more threatening, and finally the policeman shrugged helplessly and let the man go and walked away. Then another streetcar full of blacks hoping to get across the river came in from the east and the mob turned again to pulling black men, women, and children onto the street and beating and kicking them into unconsciousness.22

  Lyman Bluitt, the black doctor who worked part-time for the city, one of the civil rights leaders who had repeatedly urged the mayor to do something about the growing racial violence, arrived at the city hall dispensary a little after ten o’clock. By then, most of the white mob had gone from Main Street near city hall toward the streetcar lines and the South E
nd, but Bluitt was shocked to see that the few who remained were gathered around the bloody and battered Model T Ford in which a white policeman had died. “How foolish that is,” he said to himself. “You may as well put a red blanket in front of a bull.” He went inside city hall and was at his desk talking to a supervisor when he heard loud, belligerent voices from outside. The supervisor, a white man, said to him, “I will tell you, I’m going to take my wife and get my buggy and go out to the country. I believe that would be a good thing for you to do, as well.”

  “Mr. Ross, I have come to that conclusion myself,” said Dr. Bluitt. He stood up, put on his hat, and drove home. He had been there for about two minutes when the telephone rang. There was an emergency. Victims from the rioting were already coming in to both main hospitals, Protestant Deaconess and Catholic St. Mary’s. Both were, under usual circumstances, segregated, and blacks needing hospital care either had to make do with makeshift clinics or be driven to the city hospital for blacks across the river in St. Louis. But the hospitals did accept blacks in emergency situations, and it was quickly determined that this was an emergency situation.

  Bluitt went immediately to St. Mary’s, at Eighth and Missouri. He arrived about ten thirty. There were two wounded men there, but by the time he had finished treating them, more had arrived. And they kept coming, until the treatment rooms were full and badly injured men and women were lying on blankets in the hallway and in the operating room. Some of them were dead, or dying. By then, several white doctors had arrived. The victims kept coming in. Bluitt worked in the emergency room at St. Mary’s hospital until six o’clock the next morning, treating whites as well as blacks.23

  Around ten thirty, Mollman and Tripp met with a group of fifty or sixty businessmen in the chamber of commerce offices near city hall. The businessmen were demanding that Mollman and Tripp do something before rioters burned down the business district. Mollman reluctantly had decided it was time to ask the governor to declare martial law. Colonel Tripp disagreed, and insisted that his soldiers could stop the riot without suspending civilian authority. At that point, Tripp had about fifty mostly untrained National Guard troops spread out all over the central core of East St. Louis, and nothing they had done so far had accomplished anything but give the mobs of whites in the streets the feeling that the riot was somehow justified, or at least permissible. One soldier seemed to sum up the attitude of most of his comrades when he said loudly he wouldn’t shoot a white man for killing a black, not after what had happened the night before.24

  Mayor Mollman later said that he “didn’t know what martial law meant… but I had a kind of an idea that it would be much more drastic and … firmer and have a moral effect on the community.” Without coming to an agreement, the two men got Governor Frank Lowden on the phone in Springfield. Colonel Tripp took the phone and told Lowden that he had the situation well in hand.

  “Just a minute,” sputtered the mayor. “Let me talk to the governor.” Mollman grabbed the phone and told Lowden the situation was not in hand; several men were dead already and the riot was just getting started. The phone went back and forth between the mayor and the colonel, with the mayor arguing for more force and the colonel arguing for “moral suasion.” Finally, the governor, reluctant to admit that civilian authority had failed, decided to leave Tripp in charge, and to delay declaring martial law. He told Mollman that declaring martial law would not make things any better in the riot zone. Be patient, he advised. Many more National Guardsmen were on the way.25

  By eleven o’clock, the rioting had spread, and blacks were being beaten and shot over a square mile of East St. Louis, from the southern parts of downtown to as far north as St. Clair Avenue, which formed the boundary between East St. Louis and National City, home of the stockyards and the large meatpacking plants. Thousands of workers crossed into National City six days a week, and dozens of prostitutes patrolled the “Whiskey Chute,” the row of rowdy saloons and cheap hotels that lined the East St. Louis side of St. Clair Avenue, but the official population was less than three hundred. The residents were mostly poor people, black and white, who lived in shacks with outhouses in the back and who voted as they were told (and paid) to do.

  On St. Clair Avenue in front of the stockyards, white men were running after blacks “like boys chasing rabbits,” recalled Robert Boylan of the Globe-Democrat, who had driven up from downtown. “There were some women dressed in silk stockings and kimonos, with last night’s paint still unwashed on their cheeks, chasing negro women. [White prostitutes] were chasing a nigger woman that had a little boy by the hand. She dragged the little boy as she ran, and finally the little boy couldn’t keep up, and she grabbed him into her arms and ran into a shanty. These women stood about and threw chunks of coal at the shanty.”26

  As the rioting grew more intense, scattered fires sprang up in downtown and in the South End and railroad shanties on the bottomland west of downtown on what had once been Bloody Island. Whites had begun firing into shacks where blacks lived, or setting them ablaze, shooting the men, women, and children when they ran out the doors.

  Thomas Hunter, the black surgeon, was stopped at a gas station at Fifth Street and Illinois Avenue late that morning when the white proprietor rushed over to him and said, “Doctor, my God, flee for your life. They are killing niggers all over town. They have just killed two niggers up on Summit Avenue and they’re taking them off the streetcars down on Collinsville Avenue, and on Broadway and on Missouri Avenue.”

  Hunter said, “I’m not going to run any place.” Then he looked the white station owner directly in the eyes and said, “You’re a man of influence, you should get together with other white men of influence and go to Mayor Mollman and pressure him to protect law abiding Negroes. The good people in this city shouldn’t suffer for the depredations of the criminals.”

  “Doctor, we can’t do anything,” the man said.

  “If Negroes were killing and beating up white men in this city here, you and many other men would see that the disturbance was stopped at any cost,” Hunter replied.

  The white man shook his head slowly and said again, with apparent sadness, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.”27

  About noon, a black husband and wife from St. Louis, Edward and Lena Cook, and her teenage son were brutally attacked on Collinsville Avenue in the middle of downtown East St. Louis. The man was beaten to death. The boy was shot and mortally wounded. The woman was knocked unconscious. All three of them were picked up off the street and laid in the back of an ambulance that, at this point, was picking up the dead as well as the living. Mrs. Cook regained consciousness, wiped the blood out of her eyes, and realized that she was lying on top of a dead man. Horrified, she scrambled to the front of the ambulance to get away from the bodies. It was then that she looked back and saw that her husband and her son were both lying there dead. The Cooks had been visiting East St. Louis and had been trying to get back across the river to St. Louis when they were dragged off the streetcar by a white mob. It was the first time that they had been on the eastern side of the river. They were trying out a new fishing spot, a lake north of East St. Louis. Their thirteen-year-old daughter was with them, and she was saved from the mob by a white storekeeper, who pulled her into his shop and protected her.28

  At noon, Colonel Tripp left city hall for lunch. At that point, he had fifty or seventy-five troops in the city. Even he was not sure of the total. But he knew that the young soldiers were outnumbered by the rioters 20 or 30 to 1. Most of the militiamen carried loaded Springfield rifles with bayonets fixed to them, and many wore belts holding forty .30-30 caliber cartridges. But Tripp insisted that firing on mobs that were killing innocent men, women, and children would result in more deaths than it would save. The soldiers were told not to use their guns unless they were under attack.

  Tripp and assistant city attorney Fekete, the acting mayor, drove a cautious and circuitous route to a restaurant about six blocks from city hall, on Collinsville Avenue. At that p
oint, they were north of the riot zone. By the time they had finished lunch and drunk their coffee and paid the bill, it was almost one thirty P.M., and the riot was practically outside the front window. While Tripp and Fekete were lingering over dessert, a white man was killed nearby when whites broke into a pawnshop, presumably to steal guns and valuables, and shot the proprietor. What were Tripp and Fekete doing all morning and during that long lunch? Tripp was asked that question in October by an incredulous congressman at hearings investigating the riot.

  “Planning,” Tripp replied. The congressman remarked that he could have planned the battle of Verdun in that time.29

  Troops continued to trickle into the downtown rail station. By one thirty, when Tripp and Fekete got in Fekete’s car and headed back downtown, there were about a hundred troops under Tripp’s command, although he had seen very few of them. Tripp and Fekete were stopped by a raging mob blocking Collinsville Avenue near the Labor Temple. Tripp, in one of the moments of almost foolhardy bravery that seemed to overtake him in the midst of timidity and indecision, walked right up to a soldier—one of only a few at the scene—and grabbed his rifle. He held the Springfield out in front of his body like a horizontal bar and pushed into the mob, shouting for the “unlawful assemblage to disperse in the name of the laws of the state of Illinois.” Tripp was “tossed round and round,” he recalled, but he was not harmed and, to the apparent surprise of some onlookers, the mob grudgingly gave ground and broke up and scattered down the street. As Tripp drove away, he could see the mob reassemble, like spilled fluid converging at a low point. If his relatively easy if fleeting victory suggested to him that the riot could be stopped with a small but resolute show of force, it was several hours before he would act on that notion.