Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Back on the vacant lot, Dr. Albert McQuillan was still alive, bleeding heavily from a superficial bullet wound to the scalp. His wife was alive but bleeding, too. One black man jammed a revolver against the doctor’s head while the mob searched his car for weapons. Mrs. McQuillan screamed and tried to grab at the pistol. “A life for a life,” one man shouted, shoving Mrs. McQuillan away. Another man smashed McQuillan in the chest with the butt of a shotgun, breaking a rib.

  Desperately, McQuillan looked at the faces of the men around him and recognized one as a worker he had treated at the Aluminum Ore Company. “Don’t you know who I am?” he gasped. The man—his name was Joe Black—looked closely and shouted that he knew the white man, he was the doctor from the aluminum plant. “He treated me square when I was hurt. He’s alright.”

  The doctor seized the opportunity. “Now, you are a fine bunch of fellows,” he said. “Here I take care of one of you when you are hurt, and you are going to kill me.”

  The mob backed off. With blood pouring down his face and into his eyes, the doctor gestured at his automobile. “Help me and push my machine off that post,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, four or five men stood at the front of the car and half pushed, half lifted it away from the telephone pole.

  McQuillan climbed in, and one of the black men helped Mrs. McQuillan get into the passenger seat. McQuillan drove to his home in suburban southeast East St. Louis, where he treated his and his wife’s wounds. Neither of the McQuillans was seriously injured.

  McQuillan said later that he did not think that the blacks who had attacked him and then set him free were organized rioters, but were reacting to the white rioters. The blacks, he decided, must have decided they needed to protect themselves when they realized that the soldiers standing everywhere would do nothing to protect them. He said, “Had they been deliberately out to murder us, nothing would have stopped them.”19

  As is suggested by the attacks on the Canavans and McQuillans and the shooting of the two railroad workers, by the afternoon of July 2 armed blacks patrolled some of the African American enclaves in the South End. Their focus was Tenth Street, which not only was the western border of the neighborhoods blacks had been moving into in recent years, but led to the Free Bridge, the escape route for thousands of East St. Louis blacks. As a result, relatively little killing and burning was done by whites west of Tenth Street. The Republic reported on one border confrontation:

  The [white] mob, with the characteristic bravado of mob spirit… threatened to go toward Tenth Street, where the blacks were ambushing the roadway. They started, halted, each one looking out of the corner of his eye for men who would go to the front. None moved up to the perilous position.

  The crowd hesitated, halted, and then milled back. A shot now and then from the negro dwellings whizzed toward them. Then someone set up the shout. “Let’s go back and clean up Third Street.”

  And they turned in the other direction.

  Or, as the black St. Louis Argus put it, “The scene of the destruction of life and property was not in the thickly populated district, the mob was too cowardly to invade it.”20 Blacks like Dr. Thomas Hunter and his friends, who had decided to stay together in their middle-class neighborhood at Nineteenth Street and hope for the best, were safe as the white rioters were driven back by armed blacks protecting their homes.

  Back downtown, as Carlos Hurd roamed through the center of the riot area, he saw militiamen stand and watch the killing and beating and torching and even “fraternize,” as he put it later, with the rioters. Finally, at seven thirty, he did see “instances of what National Guardsmen, in reasonable numbers and led by worthy officers, can do.”21

  As he looked to the east along Broadway, a platoon of soldiers under the command of Colonel Clayton slowly appeared out of the billowing smoke. They had formed a hollow square, and inside the protection of the square were black men, women, and children, most of them with their hands raised as if in surrender. At the front of the blacks was a frightened boy not more than six years old.

  The mob parted with shouts and curses as the phalanx made its way without hesitation up Broadway. A few rioters tried to dash past the soldiers at the rear, but at the command of an officer those men turned with fixed bayonets and held the rioters back. The platoon marched around the corner to the police station, where they protected the refugees as they ran inside the building. Then the platoon marched at quickstep back up Broadway. Another group of soldiers appeared out of the smoke, a smaller group protecting perhaps a half-dozen blacks, and marched to the police station. Black refugees were being protected at both the police station and city hall.

  Hurd followed this group down Broadway and around the corner to the police station. For the first time, he saw Colonel Tripp, in his gray summer suit and straw hat. Hurd assumed he had just arrived in East St. Louis. Tripp had assembled a platoon of guardsmen in formation, barked a quick order, and the men marched up to Broadway, where he ordered them to change to a quickstep.

  “Get those men,” Tripp shouted, and pointed ahead, where a dozen white rioters were hauling on a rope. The other end of the rope was around the neck of a black man with a bloody head. Every time he managed to struggle to his feet, the rioters heaved on the rope and his feet flew out from under him.

  The guardsmen’s bayonets were bared, and they rushed toward the rioters, who dropped the rope and scrambled out of the street onto the sidewalks on either side of Broadway. On the south side of the street, the guardsmen held the men prisoners with their bayonets. On the north side, one soldier yelled at the men on the sidewalk, “Move on!” “No!” Tripp shouted. “Don’t let them get away. Make them prisoners.” Colonel Clayton and the troops grabbed two of the men who had been pulling the rope. The others scattered into the raucous crowd.22

  Paul Anderson, who had been in the streets of East St. Louis since eight in the morning, recalled that moment as “the first time that day I had seen any adequate effort made by the soldiers. By that time, most of the killings had already occurred.” By using 200 soldiers to round up and arrest what turned out to be 198 men—several of them blacks who simply may have been swept up with the mob—Clayton “broke the back of the riot,” Anderson later testified. “That was the turning point of the riot,” said reporter Robert Boylan, a veteran of the Indian Wars. “Our troubles were practically over then. Of course, it continued for several more hours.”23

  Assistant city attorney Fekete peeled the rope off the badly wounded man’s neck. He helped the man to his car and drove him to a hospital. Back at the police station, Tripp made certain the rioters were being booked while Clayton marched his troops back up to Broadway to make sure the riot did not get started again. As many as half of those rounded up may have been onlookers, Boylan estimated, but the show of force had its effect, scattering the crowd. After that, Boylan said, “It was guerilla warfare”—organized bodies of soldiers fighting small groups of men.24

  There were not enough cells in the jail, which was in the basement of city hall, to hold the rioters, so many of them simply had been shoved into the basement without being locked up. They then discovered that the windows could be opened, and many merely crawled out and ran away. Tripp ordered soldiers to guard the windows and exits. Guards were placed on rioters in the basement, as well as rioters in a locked room on the second floor. Tripp spotted two men he had seen dragging on a rope wrapped around the neck of a black man and ordered that they be locked in a separate cell.25 Martial law still had not been declared, but there had been a noticeable change in attitude, in the level of tolerance for acts of violence. Carlos Hurd gave full credit to Tripp. “The temper of the men in the street showed a change after the first encounter with Tripp methods. It began to seem the situation had found its master.” At this point, seemingly after he had turned over full authority to Clayton, Tripp also acted aggressively and bravely to stop the riot.

  The death and destruction were not ended, and some fires burned through the night, but a
lmost all of the killing was over. Around eight P.M., Hurd wrote, “One negro ran the gauntlet on Broadway. Several shots were fired at him, in a reckless fashion that explains the number injured by stray bullets earlier in the day. But it appeared that he got away.” Shortly afterward, Hurd began walking west on Broadway toward the streetcar stop. City officials had stopped the cars from bringing passengers into East St. Louis at seven P.M., but a few cars were continuing to take passengers across the Eads Bridge to St. Louis. An ambulance pulled into Fourth Street just ahead of him to pick up the bodies of three black men. They had been lying in the street for almost an hour.

  Downtown was quieter now, with small groups of men standing around. And though the large mobs had been broken up by military action, shots could still be heard to the south and west, and fires still burned all around. Hurd watched the attendants lift one of the dead bodies in the ambulance—now also a hearse—and then climbed onto the waiting streetcar. A man who came aboard a few minutes later, just before the car began lurching to the east, said that a small posse of armed white men in the street had prevented the removal of one of the bodies. The men said that the black man was not dead. They said he must lie there until he was. The ambulance left with only two bodies aboard, the man told Hurd.

  “I did not verify this, and I do not state it as a fact,” Hurd carefully noted in the harrowing story he wrote when he returned to the office. “Everything which I have stated as a fact came under my own observation. And what I saw was, as I have said, but a small part of the whole.”26

  As Hurd was returning to the Post-Dispatch, rioters torched a small, two-story frame building across the street from the main public library at Eighth and Broadway. It held a café and a hairdressing salon patronized by blacks. G. E. Popkess, who was standing in the shelter of the library, watched as a black woman and a small child who appeared to be about four years old ran screaming from the building. They had not gotten ten feet from the front door when a gang of about two dozen whites swarmed over them and beat them both until they lay still on the ground.

  Two white men picked up the tiny child by his arms and legs and hurled him back into the building, the small body arcing through the doorway and into the flames to the cheers of the rest of the gang. One black man and then another tried to run from the blaze. Both were shot instantly—by a squad of militiamen, Popkess would later testify under oath—and fell back into the flames. The badly burned bodies of the men who were shot were found the next day in the rubble of the building but not the body of the child, and Popkess concluded that his remains were consumed by the fire. The child was not part of the official body count.27

  Dr. Lyman Bluitt had been working nonstop in the emergency room at St. Mary’s hospital for ten hours. Finally, woozy from fatigue, he forced himself to take a breather. He stretched his muscles and walked to a window and looked out. Half a block away, at Seventh Street and Missouri Avenue, a row of flats was on fire. As he watched, the roofs began to collapse and black men, women, and children ran out onto Missouri Avenue. A gang of white men, women, and, Bluitt could swear, children threw rocks and sticks at them, as if to drive them back into the murderous flames. Bluitt heard gunfire. The whites scattered, and the blacks ran away from the blazing buildings. Bluitt didn’t see anyone fall to the ground. It appeared that all had escaped.

  Wearily, Bluitt returned to the emergency room and went back to work. Electric power had been lost during the day, and he worked through the night by the illumination of flashlights and candles. By the morning, he had treated seventy men and women, mostly blacks.28

  Downtown, at the National Guard command post near the police station, someone ran up and breathlessly passed on one of the persistent rumors that continually misled and misdirected soldiers. About two hundred armed blacks were massing a few blocks away, at the old city park at Sixth and Bond, a predominantly black area. Colonel Clayton sent a major and a company of soldiers down that way. They found two black men with guns. They took them into custody.

  Shortly after that, another alarming report came in. Another large mob—this time of whites—was forming at Third and Missouri, just a block away. Company F of the Illinois National Guard was just reporting for duty, bringing the total of men available to Colonel Clayton to a little over three hundred, some of them by then from as far away as Chicago. Before the grocery clerks and farm boys had a chance to take off their packs and bed rolls, they were ordered to trot double time to the scene. They broke up a gathering of perhaps two dozen whites, a much smaller crowd than had been reported, and told the men to go home. By that point, probably because of decisive action by the National Guard after many hours of ineffectiveness, rioters no longer massed in heavily armed groups of many hundreds. But small groups of whites continued to attack blacks and to set fires in the South End well into the night.29

  In the city room of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Carlos Hurd finished writing his story at about one thirty A.M., several hours before his early morning deadline for the first edition of the paper, which would hit the streets in the late morning. The final paragraphs read:

  I must add a word about the efficiency of the East St. Louis police. One of them kept me from going too near the fire. Absolutely the only thing that I saw policemen do was to keep the fire line. As the police detail marched to the fire, two of the men turned aside into Fourth Street, apparently to see if two negroes lying on the pavement within a few stops of Broadway were dead. These policemen got a sharp call into line from their sergeant. They were not supposed to bother themselves about dead negroes.

  In recording this, I do not forget that a policeman—by all accounts, a fine and estimable policeman—was killed by negroes the night before. I have not forgotten it in writing about the acts of the men in the street. Whether this crime excuses or palliates a massacre, which probably included none of the offenders, is something I will leave to apologists for last evening’s occurrence, if there are any such, to explain.

  The story was more than three thousand words long, exceptional for daily news reportage at any newspaper. O. K. Bovard, the tough but soft-spoken managing editor of the Post-Dispatch, so stressed brevity in news stories that he had a printed motto hanging on the walls of the city room: TERSENESS. ACCURACY. TERSENESS. But he trusted and respected Hurd. Bovard’s first important act after becoming a top editor at the paper in 1900 had been to hire the reporter away from the St. Louis Star. Given the importance of the terrible events on the other side of the river, he let Hurd write the story the way he wanted to, even giving him permission to put his account in the first person, which Bovard normally would have considered a great sin against journalistic standards of integrity and objectivity. “Reporters are not news” was a byword at Bovard’s paper. But putting the story in the first person helped humanize the account, and endowed it with a deep and palpable sense of righteous rage at the almost unbelievable acts of senseless cruelty and injustice men are capable of.30

  The headline read:

  POST-DISPATCH MAN, AN EYEWITNESS, DESCRIBES

  MASSACRE OF NEGROES

  Carlos Hurd, before he left the office, also would have written the bird line—a short phrase or quip accompanying the drawing of the Post-Dispatch mascot, the Weatherbird. Half bird, half man, dressed like a dandy and always in the latest fashions, the pop-eyed bird was drawn anew every day by staff artist Carlisle Martin to reflect the main news of the day. The bird and his comment on the news accompanied the front-page weather forecast. Hurd had a poetic touch, and almost always it was he who wrote the bird lines, and earned a dollar for each one, enough to buy a round or two for his colleagues at one of the newspaper bars nearby.

  When Hurd was finished, since his wife was out of town on vacation, he went to the Maryland Hotel near the paper and collapsed into bed. He slept deeply for five hours, and then his eyes popped open. It was a little after seven. There was no chance he would be able to go back to sleep.31

  On the front page of the July 3 St. Louis Post-Disp
atch, a grim Weather-bird in a seasonally appropriate polka dot shirt frowned beneath the prediction that the weather was going to be partly cloudy and warm for the Fourth of July. Carlisle Martin’s Weatherbird looked simultaneously enraged and deeply sad. In the set of the Weatherbird’s jaw and the sternness of his visage, he called to mind photographs of the sixteenth president of the United States in moments of angry despair over a war he hated but that he had thrown the nation’s young men into, a war over America’s treatment of blacks. The Weatherbird was perched next to Hurd’s extraordinary three-thousand-word moral diatribe, and Hurd’s bird line read:

  AND LINCOLN CAME FROM ILLINOIS

  CHAPTER 11

  Legacy of a Massacre

  Adjutant General Frank S. Dickson, the veteran commander of the Illinois National Guard, reached East St. Louis shortly after midnight on July 3. In full uniform, he went straight to city hall through crowds milling around almost aimlessly. He heard occasional shouts, but no shots, and the crowds, he was told, were much smaller than they had been at the height of the riot. There was a sense of lassitude, even of exhaustion, among those who remained. But Dickson, who had commanded troops in riots before, knew the violence could erupt again, particularly if control of the streets was not clamped down by uniformed men carrying guns, men who were willing—reluctant but willing—to shoot rioters.

  At city hall, after threading his way down corridors packed with hundreds of black refugees lying exhausted on the floor or lined up for one of the few toilets in the building, Dickson discovered that Mayor Mollman had gone home to bed. He strode into the mayor’s empty office, picked up the telephone, and called him. When Mollman had cleared the sleep from his voice, he told the general, with great relief, “I’m very glad you are here. Take charge of the situation and restore order in East St. Louis.” The mayor said he would “be down in the morning,” hung up, and went back to bed.1