Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Hurd wrote:

  One frightened black girl, probably 20 years old, got so far as Broadway with no worse treatment than jeers and thrusts. At Broadway, in view of militiamen, the white women, several of whom had been watching the massacre of the negro men, pounced on the negress… [T]hey were the heroines of the moment with that gathering of men, and when one man, sick of the brutality he had seen, seized one of the women by the arm to stop an impending blow, he was hustled away, with fists under his nose … “Let the girls have her” was the shout as the women attacked the young negress. The victim’s cry, “Please, please, I ain’t done nothing,” was stopped by a blow in the mouth with a broomstick, which one of the women swung like a baseball bat. Another woman seized the negress’ hands, and the blow was repeated as she struggled helplessly. Fingernails clawed her hair, and the sleeves were torn from her [shirt]waist, when some of the men called, “Now let her see how fast she can run.” The women did not readily leave off beating her, but they stopped short of murder, and the crying, hysterical girl ran down the street.5

  A block or so away, fellow Post-Dispatch reporter Paul Y. Anderson walked up Broadway and saw mobs all the way to Eighth Street, burning homes and shooting blacks. Two black men tried to save themselves by walking slowly with their hands on top of their heads in a gesture of surrender. Rioters shot both of them.6

  The Reverend George W. Allison was at the railroad station downtown when eleven or twelve white women and men—he thought they were all drunk and looked like whores and pimps—rushed into the station and attacked a black woman waiting for a train to take her out of East St. Louis. The station, crowded with men, women, and restless children, turned into bedlam. Allison and a couple of other men tried to protect the woman, getting between her and her attackers, but the terrified black woman darted out from the corner where she was huddling and the white women ripped her clothes off, leaving her in her corset. Allison went immediately to the police station but the mayor wouldn’t let him have a policemen to go back and arrest the assailants. One of the officers said, “The truth is that there is no damn town big enough for the two races.”7

  Barely two blocks from the police station, Carlos Hurd heard a cheer go up behind him, and when he turned he saw a black man with his head laid open by a paving stone being dragged down an alley toward Fourth Street. Someone looped a thin rope around his neck. Someone else shouted that the rope was not strong enough, and the men circling around the prone man began laughing and making jokes. The rope was thrown over a cable box low on a light pole, and several men hauled on the rope, pulling the unresisting black man to his feet, where he stood wavering for a few seconds, held like a puppet, until the rope snapped. The victim and one of the men holding the rope tumbled to the ground. An old white man wearing a black, shiny-billed cap ran out of a nearby house, one that had not yet begun to burn, and shouted, “Don’t you hang that man in the street. I dare you to!”

  The men accepted the dare. The old man was shoved aside, and someone ran up with a stronger rope. “Right there,” Hurd wrote, “I saw the most sickening incident of the evening. To put the rope around the negro’s neck, one of the lynchers stuck his finger inside the gaping scalp and lifted the negro’s head by it, literally bathing his hand in the man’s blood.

  “‘Get hold, and pull for East St. Louis’ called a man with a black coat and a new straw hat, as he seized the other end of the rope. The rope was long, but not too long for the number of hands that grasped it, and this time the negro was lifted to a height of about seven feet from the ground.”

  Hurd dashed up to Broadway, where he had spotted a small group of militiamen. He pled with them to stop the lynching, but they ignored him and stood and watched as the men hauled the victim to his feet and then pulled him in the air. They held him there until he had stopped kicking, and then tied off the rope. Several of the guardsmen traded gory jokes with the rioters as the man hung in the air, dead.8

  At least two other black men were hanged from light or telephone poles in downtown East St. Louis. One survived the hanging and was sitting on the steps of Bader’s drugstore, the rope still around his neck, when a white man walked up to him and, without saying a word, shot and killed him. The second also lived through the hanging, but died four days later of internal injuries from being beaten and kicked and dragged through the streets.9

  And what were white citizens of East St. Louis, the thousands who were not locked in their houses or actively participating in the riot, doing on those downtown streets lined with stores and businesses? Watching. Mostly, observers said, with approval. The majority of East St. Louis whites, said G. E. Popkess of the East St. Louis Daily Journal, were “in sympathy with the rioters.”10

  Roy Albertson of the St. Louis Republic left the paper’s East St. Louis office, in the Arcade Building across from city hall, about seven P.M. His three temporary legmen had already been dispatched to scenes of violence, and he watched in front of a saloon at Fourth and Broadway as three white women in flouncy dresses and gaudy makeup—he recognized them and knew them to be prostitutes—shoved and beat a young black woman who was desperately trying to escape their blows. She huddled over a tiny baby wrapped in her arms.

  “Have mercy on my baby!” she screamed, but one of the white women balled up her fist and slammed it into the bundle in the black woman’s arms. The black woman wailed, “Leave my baby alone.” The whores followed her as she ran from one side of Broadway to the other, falling down several times, and they ripped most of her outer clothing off before she was able to struggle to her feet and run up Broadway in her shredded underwear, still clutching the baby. The whores jeered at her as she ran. Albertson learned that the whores had already beaten up two or three other black women that night.

  Albertson decided Fourth and Broadway “wasn’t a very safe place for me,” and headed back to his office. On his way, Albertson saw Lieutenant Colonel E. P. Clayton and told him, “Colonel, you won a reputation for yourself in the first riot. It is time to be taking this situation in hand, and not be trying to handle it with kid gloves the way a certain other man is.”

  The colonel laughed bitterly, and shook his head. “Well, this time I’m superseded.”11

  It seemed to Albertson that Clayton’s superior, Colonel Tripp, instead of trying to stop the violence, was busy grabbing news photographers and trying to prevent them from taking pictures of the riot. Some of the rioters as well as policemen and soldiers were more direct in trying to conceal evidence of the atrocities being committed in East St. Louis. Police and soldiers confiscated cameras and bared the film to the light, and at least three newspaper photographers had their cameras smashed by rioters, which is the main reason so few photographs remain of the riot.12

  After a quick supper at the Illmo Hotel, Colonel Tripp and Fekete walked over to city hall and met with Colonel Clayton. Mayor Mollman put in an appearance, and city controller James M. Kelley ran over from the fire area and asked the mayor if anything could be done to stop the torching. Mollman said the firemen had been there, but had retreated when it became clear that no one would protect them from the mob.13

  “Well,” said Tripp, “we think they are a little thin-skinned. They ought to be able to protect their hose.” Kelley angrily replied that the firemen themselves should be protected so they could do their jobs and save the city from burning to the ground. Tripp did not reply, and the mayor did not seem to be interested in the conversation. Just then, a man ran up to report that a huge, out-of-control mob had gathered at Fourth and Broadway, about two blocks away. Fekete, Tripp, and a major named William Klauser jumped into Fekete’s car and rushed to the scene. They saw two black men lying dead in the streets, and a body still hanging from a light pole.

  Tripp could locate only three or four soldiers, scattered on the edges of the mob of fifteen hundred men and women, doing nothing. Apparently horrified at what he saw, with black men coming under fire while running from the burning buildings, Tripp jumped out of the car in hi
s summer suit and straw boater and tried to disperse the mob himself. “In the name of the law of the state of Illinois and the governor of Illinois,” he shouted into jeers and catcalls, “I am ordering you to disperse this unlawful assembly, go to your homes and discontinue the rioting.” The mob laughed and screamed obscenities, and a few men rushed Tripp and began pushing him. Deciding the odds were impossible, Tripp and Fekete returned to city hall, where a fresh contingent of troops had been scheduled to arrive a little after seven P.M.14

  The arrival of Company B of the Illinois National Guard, with three officers and sixty-six men, brought the total number of troops in East St. Louis to about two hundred thirty, widely scattered through the central city. Tripp ordered Colonel Clayton to “take personal command” of the new troops “and such additional men as he could find” and return to Fourth and Broadway. Clayton loaded the soldiers into trucks and accompanied them to Fourth and Broadway, two blocks away. Tripp followed in an automobile. Tripp insisted later that the chain of command never changed, but either Tripp said something he hadn’t said before or Clayton chose to interpret Tripp’s orders in a new and more forceful way. For whatever reason, at around seven P.M. on the night of July 2, with hundreds of buildings in flame and more than two dozen people dead, Colonel Clayton, a battle-tested, professional soldier, took charge.15

  On Broadway between Seventh and Eighth streets, black policeman Otto Nelson saw the fires moving eastward toward the two-story frame-and-brick house where he and his wife lived. They were in their thirties, with no children. He had come home at noon to be with her. He told her to leave, to go to St. Louis, but she had refused to go. If he was going to stay, she said, so was she. White men had fired into the building several times in the afternoon and early evening, and the Nelsons were sitting on the floor in the middle room of their second-story shotgun flat, keeping away from the windows. About seven P.M., a white man threw a brick through the front window and Nelson raised his head enough to look out and see a half dozen white men in the street, some holding bricks or paving stones.

  Just then, half a dozen militiamen came into view. Mrs. Nelson, thinking she would be protected, ran to the front of the house, but when she appeared in the front window several white men fired into the house and she dove to the floor. The soldiers did nothing. Nelson yelled to his wife, “Let’s try and get out the back way,” and they ran to the rear of the house. But the rickety wooden back steps were already beginning to burn.

  With his wife hanging on to him, Nelson walked out the back door and down the steps into the flames. The bottom of her dress caught fire, and she let go of her husband and backed up the stairs. He turned and they both slapped at the flames on her dress until they turned to smoke. Then the two of them jumped half a flight of stairs through the flames to the ground.

  The neighboring houses to the west were already burning. Nelson and his wife ran out of the back yard and started up Eighth Street, toward Broadway. A white man Nelson had never seen before was standing nearby, watching the fires, and when he saw the Nelsons heading toward Broadway, he waved them back. “Don’t go that way,” he said, “go this way.” He waved toward the alley at the rear of the houses. Across the alley, near Eighth Street, was a large vacant lot that was covered with a jungle of weeds and low saplings. Holding hands, the Nelsons ran across the alley and threw themselves down into the weeds. They hid and watched for ten or fifteen minutes, catching their breath, as East St. Louis burned around them. Only then did they discover the painful burns on the palms of their hands.

  More white men with guns came down Eighth Street, firing into the flames, driving blacks back into the burning flats. But most of the rioting was on Broadway. And the Nelsons could see flames to the south as well, toward Walnut Street. There was no place to run, and by now it was almost completely dark except for the light of the fires around them. The Nelsons huddled all night in the weeds half a block from the scorched remains of their home.16

  A half-dozen blocks south of downtown, as night fell, a diminutive black woman named Katherine Kennedy decided it was time to leave the house on Piggott Avenue where she was raising her nine children without a father. Earlier in the day, white men passing by had fired into the house, and now flames from buildings that had been torched were spreading toward the wooden structure. She had been warned that white mobs were attacking blacks at the eastern end of the nearby Free Bridge, so she and her younger brother, Eddie, gathered together the six boys and girls who were at the home and headed west across the nearby railroad yards for the river.

  They carried with them stockings and long strips of cloth and lengths of clothesline. As they went, sometimes ducking into the shadows to hide from rioters, they gathered scrap lumber from shanties that had been torn down. At the river’s edge, they built a raft.

  When they first launched the raft and everyone began paddling with planks, the clumsy vessel just kept turning around in circles, but eventually they figured out how to divide the paddlers so the boat would head west across the river. The Missouri shore was five hundred yards away. After a long struggle, with the relentless current carrying the boat downstream as they fought their way across, they landed on the western shore of the Mississippi well south of downtown St. Louis. Seven-year-old Samuel Kennedy looked back across the river toward East St. Louis. He would never forget what he saw. It looked like the whole horizon was on fire.17

  From his large home in suburban Alta Sita, politically powerful real estate mogul Thomas J. Canavan could look to the west toward the South End and Mississippi River and see smoke rising. Concerned about what was happening to his property, he and his grown son decided to drive downtown and look around. For reasons that remain unexplained—perhaps their wives had left the house—they took Canavan’s younger son, who was thirteen, and Canavan’s two-year-old grandson with them.

  At about seven twenty, they climbed in the car with the older son driving and the children in the backseat and headed west from Twenty-sixth Street along the main thoroughfare, Bond Avenue. At Fourteenth Street, in the midst of a black enclave, they stopped when they saw a mob two or three blocks ahead, moving their way. A car sped ahead of the mob and jammed on its brakes as it came up alongside the Canavans. The white driver waved at them to turn back and then rolled down his window and shouted, “Turn around quick, you will be killed. They are shooting at me.”

  The man jammed his foot onto the accelerator and was gone. Canavan looked again to the west and saw that the black mob had gotten closer. It was led by six or eight men, several of them armed with pistols and seemingly firing at random. Suddenly, with a scream of tires, a Ford came speeding through the mob, scattering the men. The Ford pulled up next to Canavan’s car.

  A man rolled down the driver’s side window. It was Dr. Albert B. McQuillan, who worked at the Aluminum Ore Company. His wife was with him. He told the Canavans that he had just escaped from the mob, and that they all needed to flee. McQuillan headed east and the Canavans followed.

  McQuillan and the Canavans had gone a block or so when they saw two white men in work clothes, walking eastward on Bond. Suddenly, black men jumped out of the head-high weeds of a vacant lot and shot both of them—one fell where he was shot, and the other stumbled away and tripped over the curb. The doctor later found out the white men were George Hare, who was badly wounded, and Robert Murray, who died several hours later. The two men had been walking home from work in the Southern Railroad yards.

  The Canavans and McQuillan realized they were trapped, with one hostile gang a block or two behind them and the other just ahead. McQuillan turned his wheels to the right, stepped on the gas and, bouncing over the curb, smashed through the high weeds of a vacant lot, heading for Market Avenue, a block south of Bond. The Canavans started to follow him, but they stopped when they saw armed black men run through the edge of the lot to get ahead of McQuillan. The men were so close that Canavan could see the mad fury on their faces and hear them shout, “Get the white bastards.”


  McQuillan’s car, engine racing, bottomed out in the tall weeds and slid to a halt against a telephone pole. More blacks appeared in the waist-high vegetation, and several of them were carrying rifles or shotguns. McQuillan and his wife climbed out of the Ford and were trying to run south to safety. The black men ran after them, firing. Canavan saw McQuillan fall to the ground when a man with a pistol shot him in the head from close range. Mrs. McQuillan grabbed the gun and tried to tear it from the man’s hands, pleading with him and the other armed blacks to spare her husband.

  The Canavans took the opportunity to speed away. “I could look in many directions, and everywhere I saw a colored house, they were shooting out of it,” Canavan recalled. With bullets flying around them, the Canavans turned north on Fifteenth Street. They spotted the white men who had been shot earlier lying on the curb. “One of those men is alive,” Canavan’s older son shouted. “I’m going to pick him up.” He stopped the car and the Canavan men opened the door and dragged George Hare into the car, putting him in the backseat. They took the wounded man to the closest hospital, Deaconess, seven or eight blocks to the north at Fifteenth and State streets. It was nine P.M. before the Canavans got home. None of them was hurt.18