Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  All afternoon and evening in East St. Louis, huge crowds of black men, women, and children, some of them carrying battered suitcases or large shopping bags filled with clothes and other belongings, some of them with little more than the clothes they wore, were also fleeing to the east out Illinois and Cahokia avenues, away from the Mississippi River. Dr. Thomas Hunter, the black surgeon who had left downtown when the rioting had intensified, was standing with his wife and others at Nineteenth Street in his mostly black, middle-class neighborhood well east of downtown watching the mass exodus. He recognized a patient and asked what was going on downtown. “Oh, doctor,” the man said, “they are killing and beating our people. And they are burning everything down there at Fifth and Broadway.”

  “My god,” said Hunter. “What about my office?”

  “It’s gone,” the man replied. “Burned down.”

  Hunter was unnerved by the news. He had heard rumors that “business Negroes”—Bundy and other influential men in the black community—were going to be targeted by rioters, and he feared that his house would be attacked as well. “I think we had better get in the machine and take to the tall weeds,” he said, but then he had second thoughts. There were too many people, including a druggist and his family and two female schoolteachers, to fit in his car, and he didn’t want to abandon anyone to the riot. He decided they would be safer staying where they were as long as they kept away from his own home. They found shelter at a neighbor’s house. “I guess it will be just about as safe there as any other place,” Hunter said, “and we will all be together.”11

  Mayor Mollman and Colonel Tripp stayed at the meeting at the chamber of commerce into the late afternoon, arguing with each other and chamber members, seemingly at a loss as to how to stop the destruction and murder going on around them. Lawyer Dan McGlynn told the mayor that “two or three determined men” could stop the riot in its tracks. He said later, “I remember there were four or five of us there that said if we didn’t get proper assurance from the Mayor that we would do something … We could go over to a hardware store and get some shotguns and rifles and get out and undertake to save the town from being burned up. [But] the mayor assured us that Colonel Tripp was here and that everything would be all right in just a little while.”12

  At about that point, Colonel Tripp left the meeting. He received a report from police he felt he couldn’t ignore. Armed blacks were forming a mob in a saloon “out in the colored districts” around Seventeenth and Bond and were preparing to attack whites wherever they found them. Tripp and the chief of police and a couple of soldiers headed east, with assistant city attorney Fekete driving. They were followed by an army truck intended to hold prisoners. They found about fifteen black men sitting in the saloon, taking it easy. “Beer was on the table,” Tripp reported later, “but there was no disorder. I told them if they lived there they had a right to remain, but if they had any arms to surrender them.” Nobody said anything. Tripp asked the bartender if he was “organizing any forces of colored people.” He said he wasn’t. Tripp and Chief Payne began searching people, and they found that one man was holding twelve or fifteen shotgun cartridges. They had been split with a knife. The effect of cutting the cartridge would be that all of the tiny lead balls would tend to explode from the barrel in a single lethal lump, like a bullet fired from a big-game hunting rifle. The man was arrested. In a cubbyhole in the saloon, where a bartender might reach for it if there was trouble, they found a loaded rifle. The rifle and shotgun shells were confiscated, and the other men were told to go home.

  The saloon adjoined a garage owned by Dr. Leroy Bundy. Tripp was told by the men in the saloon that they hadn’t seen Bundy all day. A search of the black leader’s garage by the soldiers revealed nothing but auto supplies and stationery. On a tip by the black bartender, Tripp and Payne searched a saloon across the street that had a white clientele. They found and confiscated another gun. The white men said they hadn’t seen Bundy for a couple of days. Tripp and his military escort walked down the street to Bundy’s house. His wife said she hadn’t seen him for about twenty-four hours.13

  Late that afternoon, black policeman John Eubanks got a call at his home northeast of downtown from the chief of detectives asking him to come down to the police station. Eubanks kissed his wife good-bye and told her to stay away from the windows and head east at the first sound of gunfire. He walked downtown by Missouri Avenue, staying well clear of now-embattled Broadway, and went up to the detective bureau on the second floor. The chief of detectives said, “John, I tell you things are in an awful condition. They’ve been rioting all over town. It seems like there’s a dozen mobs working in the city. I’ve got to leave the office, and I want you to stay here and take charge and answer any calls that come in.” Eubanks remained on duty in the police station until the next morning, and then was sent to city hall to help with the hundreds of refugees from the riot being sheltered there.14

  Nearby, at Broadway and Collinsville, members of the Illinois National Guard leaned on their rifles as blacks were beaten and kicked. One older black man on his way home from work ran from the mob, his lunch pail swinging in his right hand, and tried to protect himself by heading for a line of national guardsmen. Several of the militiamen held the man off with bared bayonets, and forced him back into the arms of the mob. He was beaten until he fell down, and then kicked in the head. He tried to shield his face, but soon was unconscious, and the kicks continued. An ambulance pulled up, but a white man standing over the body threatened to kill the driver if he picked up the black man. The ambulance driver, an agonized look on his smoke-streaked face, stood silent for a moment, staring at the white man, and then turned and drove away. The next day, the old black man lay dead in a black funeral parlor that was crowded with bodies. His arm, stiffened from rigor, still shielded his face.

  The ambulance driver drove off toward the downtown railroad station, where another black man had been reported lying in blood, badly injured or dead. Behind him, siren blaring, was a fire engine heading in the same direction. New fires were springing up all around downtown.15

  Standing on Broadway, Baptist preacher George W. Allison heard the sirens scream past him, rising and falling in pitch. He could see the fires nearby in the Black Valley and a mob of white men, as he later put it, “hunting for Negroes [who] were not armed or could not defend themselves.” The whites carefully stayed away from the most dangerous section of the Valley, the so-called Bad Lands along Walnut, until fires had spread into that area and sent blacks scattering. At that point the whites could shoot them down and then advance like foot soldiers entering enemy territory after an artillery barrage.16

  On Sixth Street, in the midst of all the chaos, Charles Roger was standing outside of his chemical plant when a man in a passing mob of whites gestured with his thumb at the building and said, “There’s a place that would make a good fire.” But another man looked over at Roger and grinned. “Leave that place alone,” the man said. “He’s no nigger lover. He don’t have any niggers.” Roger employed two blacks, but was immensely relieved that the men did not know that. The man who had spared his plant looked only vaguely familiar, and Roger was struck with how few of the rioters he recognized, even though he had spent so many years and so much time in the midst of the working men of East St. Louis. He had even seen a couple of strangers wearing what looked like brand-new blue cotton work shirts and pants, as if they had bought them to blend in with working men. He wondered where they came from.

  The men walked on by, heading east, and the fires spread in that direction until Roger’s plant and warehouses were covered in dense smoke. Although small fires sprang up from time to time on the building, Roger and the few employees who stayed with him were able to extinguish them. By the next morning, his plant was the only building standing in four square blocks.

  Later, Roger was asked if there were any soldiers around when the men were torching buildings.

  “One,” Roger replied.

  “Wha
t was he doing?”

  “Shooting niggers.”17

  CHAPTER 10

  A Drama of Death

  The sun loomed ominously large and low in the western sky, glowing deep orange through the black smoke that rolled up from downtown East St. Louis. Sundown was an hour away, but the light was already dimming as darkness came early to East St. Louis on July 2.

  The State Street car stopped at Broadway and Collinsville Avenue, a couple of blocks from city hall, and at about six thirty P.M. Carlos Hurd stepped down into what he later described as “a drama of death.” A fire engine screamed past him heading east, where fires burned along Broadway as far as he could see. A light west wind—and, he soon discovered, men with torches and oily rags—pushed the flames eastward. Then he heard shots, and shouts of “They got him! They got him!” and Hurd ran toward the intersection of Fourth Street, shoving his way through a milling mob of men and a surprising number of women who were shouting and running about excitedly, drunk with murderous exhilaration. He reached the intersection and saw hundreds of people looking south at a row of burning buildings on Fourth Street between Broadway and Walnut Avenue.

  Smoke and flames were rising from two- and three-story frame and brick buildings where blacks lived above and in the rear of storefronts. Flames grabbed at the rickety wooden rear stairs—the “fire escapes”—and leaped to the flimsy outbuildings. The fires lent an eerie glow to the scene, and Hurd saw a circle of rioters around the body of a black man who had been shot. His head was bleeding profusely. He tried to rise up, and a boot smashed into his face.

  “Don’t do that, I haven’t hurt nobody,” the man screamed hoarsely, but another kick came. The black man kept struggling with his attackers. A young man dressed for the office, the only person Hurd recalled seeing among the rioters who looked like a business or professional man, lifted a broken chunk of curbstone and hurled it down at the black’s head, silencing him. The natty young man turned and walked away from the now-still body, past a seemingly unconcerned National Guard sergeant and several militiamen, all of them holding rifles. The sergeant strolled over to the circle of rioters around the body and peered down at the black man whose head was in a growing pool of blood.

  “This man is done for,” he said. “You men better get away from him.” The sergeant walked away. Hurd asked if he couldn’t call an ambulance. “The ambulances quit coming,” the sergeant replied, seemingly without much interest. Another shot pierced the babble of voices and sirens and the suck and roar of fires, and Hurd was horrified to see two men with revolvers taking aim at blacks as they ran one by one from the blazing buildings.

  “It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered,” he wrote later that night.

  Hurd stayed in East St. Louis for two hours, never getting more than a couple of blocks from where he had stepped down from the trolley car, and then he hurried back across the river to the Post-Dispatch headquarters to write with seething anger that what he had seen in the streets of downtown East St. Louis was not so much a riot as a “massacre,” “a man hunt” conducted “on a sporting basis” where “a black skin was a death warrant.”

  “I have read of St. Bartholomew’s night,” he would write in a report that is remarkable for its personal fury. “I have heard stories of the latter-day crimes of the Turks in Armenia, and I have learned to loathe the German army for its barbarity in Belgium. But I do not believe that Moslem fanaticism or Prussian frightfulness could perpetrate murders of more deliberate brutality than those which I saw committed, in daylight, by citizens of the State of Abraham Lincoln.” Somehow, he wrote, he could not call what he saw “mob violence”:

  “A mob is passionate, a mob follows one man or a few men blindly; a mob sometimes takes chances… The East St. Louis men took no chances… They went in small groups, there was little leadership, and there was a horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun about it. I cannot allow even the doubtful excuse of drink. No man whom I saw showed the effects of liquor.” A few men shouted at the mob to stop, and Hurd shouted too, but he concluded, “Only a volley of lead would have stopped these murderers.” The police were nowhere to be seen, and straggling soldiers stood around and watched, leaning on their rifles, some of them with bayonets bared as men shouted “Get a nigger” and earned a chorus of replies, “Get another!”

  “It was,” he judged, “like nothing so much as the holiday crowd, with thumbs turned down, in the Roman Coliseum, except that here the shouters were their own gladiators, and their own wild beasts.”1

  Robert R. Thomas, owner of the Hill-Thomas Lime and Cement Company south of Broadway on Sixth Street, was eating supper at his home in Lands-downe, about four miles northeast of downtown East St. Louis, when the telephone rang. He knew it would be bad news. “The air was full of lightning that day,” he said later. The distraught foreman of the plant’s stables told him a building just north of the company’s stables had been set ablaze. The foreman said he was going to move the horses and mules, and Thomas said he would come right back down. When Thomas arrived at the cement company, the flames had spread to the stables and the main plant. A large mob of men stood around, and some of them fired rifles and pistols into the building, which was just beginning to burn. Thomas feared that some of his black teamsters—there were a dozen of them in all—were still in the building, where they had hoped to be safe from marauding mobs, but he decided there was nothing he could do without help. He drove five blocks to city hall, past a couple of dozen soldiers, talking and smoking cigarettes, watching as the riot raged around them.

  Jumping from the car at city hall, he asked a group of loitering soldiers who was in charge. He was directed to Colonel Tripp, who was talking to a small group of soldiers, seemingly without urgency. Thomas later recalled:

  It took me some little time to get his attention. I butted in once and he told me if I would just wait until he got through with what he was doing, we could probably get along a little faster. I made it so insistent that he finally took notice of what I wanted. I told him some of our men were down there and they probably would be burned up if he didn’t get some help. He finally called, maybe, eight soldiers, and it is my recollection that he called them by their first names—didn’t give an order to anybody, but called them over to him and told them to go down there and see what they could do.

  One of them said, “I haven’t had my supper yet,” and another said, “I just got off duty.” They seemed to know him very well, and he finally persuaded them to go down there. He persuaded them finally to get in a truck. I don’t think he put an officer in charge of them.

  “There were several hundred soldiers right around city hall, coming from upstairs and different rooms around there,” Thomas said. “I am satisfied there were enough soldiers there to at least have made a showing if they had had somebody to show them what to do [but] nobody seemed to be in command.”

  Thomas drove back south, past dozens of loitering soldiers, and watched his plant burn to the ground. If the soldiers in the truck ever arrived at the burning plant, they left immediately. A mob of a hundred men surrounded the blaze, Thomas said, “shooting at anybody that would show their head, and shooting at random when there wasn’t anybody to shoot at.”

  Then he saw several black teamsters run out of the flames without being shot. At this point, the mob seemed more interested in watching the buildings burn down than in taking shots at men fleeing from the fire. It later turned out that two of the company’s black teamsters had been wounded in the riot and one man, a twelve-year employee named Moses Keefe, simply disappeared. He is not included in the official death toll—by that point, at least two dozen people were dead—but, according to Thomas, there was enough evidence that he had been killed for an insurance company to pay off Keefe’s brother on a $300 life policy.

  One of the wounded men was shot trying to get horses away from the fire; the other was ambushed about three blocks south of the plant by a gang of young men firing at blacks fleeing d
own a main route to the Free Bridge. The man was so badly wounded that he lay immobile in a ditch and was assumed to be dead. At four P.M. the next day, he regained consciousness and was taken by ambulance to a city hospital in St. Louis.2

  Charles Roger stood in the doorway of his Walnut Avenue chemical plant, keeping an eye out for fires while trying to avoid getting himself killed, his anger growing into rage as he watched militiamen in khaki uniforms standing around joking as a gang of five or six white men set fire to the shacks and flats all around him. A building nearby burst into flames and several blacks dashed out the door and ran east. Half a dozen white men stood and jeered but let the blacks run. One rioter shouted that the soldiers couldn’t shoot them if they tried. A soldier replied, “The hell I can’t. I’ll show you.”

  The soldier put the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the small group of blacks running away—they were now perhaps a hundred yards down Walnut Avenue—and squeezed the trigger. One black man fell to the street. The others kept running.

  When Roger recited the incident three months later to the congressional committee investigating the riot, Congressman Ben Johnson asked if Roger had gone to see if the man was wounded or dead.

  “No, I didn’t,” Roger said. “You know, there were a great many instances where really common humanity would urge me to go ahead and interfere, but what were you going to do? You know well enough you would get killed yourself.”3

  By then, Carlos Hurd had walked a block or so south of Broadway, to where rioters were chasing blacks down a railroad spur, firing at them with rifles and pistols. Then he heard more shots coming from Fourth Street, and when he ran there he saw two more blacks lying in the street, apparently dead. Railroad shacks along the street—shacks used by black prostitutes—had been torched, and black women ran from them. A gang of white women began chasing them, cursing and hurling stones. The white women, Hurd wrote that night, were “of the baser sort … I do not wish to be understood as saying that these women were representative of the womanhood of East St. Louis. Their faces showed, all too plainly, exactly who and what they were.” They were prostitutes, and professional jealousy may have had as much to do with their rage as racial hatred.4