Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Dickson took a quick automobile tour of the devastated riot area. Fires still smoldered in the remains of gutted buildings across fifteen or twenty square blocks of downtown East St. Louis. Bodies lay in ditches and deep gutters and shadowed alleys, in the high weeds of vacant lots, and in the stagnant water of Cahokia Creek. And the smell of rotting and burned flesh was unmistakable in the acrid smoke that still hung stubbornly over the bottomlands of East St. Louis.

  Adjutant General Frank S. Dickson

  The general found it worrisome that the fires and mayhem had been spread over such a wide area, an area that was almost impossible to patrol effectively with a few hundred troops. At that point, he had about seventeen officers and two hundred seventy men under his command. However, troops were arriving at the East St. Louis railroad station every hour or two. By sunup, which officially came at four forty A.M., his troops would number about five hundred, although most of them were green as new hay.2

  Dozens of somewhat more experienced soldiers, federalized members of the Illinois National Guard who had come in response to the May riot, were still camped just outside of town, on a field near the slaughterhouse village of National City, with vague orders to “protect assets vital to national security in a time of war.” They had never joined the main body of militia under the command of Tripp, Clayton, and now Dickson. Instead, they continued to guard bridges and keep rioters away from industrial plants. Declaring martial law might have brought them into the fold, but Governor Frank Lowden could never quite bring himself to do that, in part perhaps because the two men supposedly in charge at the height of the riot—the mayor and Colonel Tripp—had so vehemently disagreed on whether it was necessary. Dickson, however, inspired confidence that he could control the situation without martial law.

  A former Illinois congressman, Dickson had been a professional soldier for twenty-one years, fighting in the Spanish American War as an enlisted man and working his way up to the top ranks. Dickson had been in command in the brutal riot a few years earlier in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and in two smaller flare-ups in the deeply Southern river town of Cairo at the tip of Illinois. Unfortunately, when the riot broke out in East St. Louis, he had been on a train returning to Springfield from official business in Washington.

  “In all riot situations, there are one or more particular danger points,” Dickson would explain later. “In order to handle more effectively a mob situation, your troops should be unified as much as possible.” Soldiers should never be scattered throughout a riot area, he said, but should be concentrated at a few trouble spots. And if there was a shortage of troops, sometimes the best thing was to keep them all together and attack the riot at its core.

  “In my experience,” Dickson said, “in almost all activities the difficulty is with officers and not with individual men.” The average soldier, he believed, would carry out his orders “if he has clearly in his mind exactly what the instructions are. Much of the haziness comes from haziness on the part of the officers.”

  After tours of East St. Louis, Dickson met at city hall with top subordinates and went over a detailed map of downtown. He showed the officers where he wanted troops to be concentrated, and told them to begin by forming a “flying squad” of a dozen or so trusted men to go immediately up to Broadway and Collinsville and disperse the crowds Dickson had seen there. The general ordered that the remainder of the troops be broken up into five or six groups, and sent to other points where people were congregated and fires still burned.

  “No one man starts a riot,” Dickson stressed. “It is only when two or three or four get together that things begin … to snowball.” Soldiers were to be ordered to keep their rifles loaded and their bayonets bared.

  As the light of the rising sun came dimly through the lingering smoke and the haze of morning, black policeman Otto Nelson and his wife cautiously rose from their hiding place in the tall weeds near Broadway. Well over two hundred buildings—homes, stores, cafés, barber shops, schools—had been destroyed. Most of them were in black neighborhoods downtown and in the South End, but rioters also attacked and looted areas where many whites lived. The Nelsons’ old tenement flat was smoldering rubble now. They stretched aching muscles and brushed themselves off and looked around at a scene that, for several blocks in several directions, looked like the aftermath of house-to-house fighting in the Great War. The Nelsons didn’t see any white people around, and no soldiers, and so they began walking slowly to the east, away from downtown East St. Louis. They hoped to pick up a ride a few blocks along at the home of a friend with an automobile, but when they got there the car was gone, and so was the house. Soon they found themselves part of a stream of black refugees leaving East St. Louis. The Nelsons walked nine miles that day and did not return to East St. Louis for two weeks.3

  The last lethal outburst of the East St. Louis riot took place in broad daylight on the morning of July 3 in a rough and remote part of town that had once been part of Bloody Island and was still called the Island.

  Black workmen from a railroad freight house near the Mississippi levee regularly gathered in the rear of a saloon to drink beer for breakfast. About seven thirty on the morning of July 3, several men were gathered in the usual spot. They felt safe, half a mile or more from the fringes of the riot, which seemed in any event to be over. They were boisterous, as usual. Someone reported to police that blacks were creating a disturbance in the area, and that the saloon was open contrary to the mayor’s order of the previous day. Three policemen went down to check the report out, two patrolmen and a sergeant named Cornelius Meehan. They were accompanied by seven or eight national guardsmen. When the black men saw the approaching soldiers and police they jumped up from their stools and wooden boxes and started to run away. Meehan, according to two of the soldiers, ordered the soldiers to fire.

  The soldiers fired, killing one of the workmen, wounding another, and blowing off at the elbow the right arm of a black girl named Mineola Magee who was just emerging from an outhouse. A black porter heard the shots, ran inside the saloon, and tried to hide in the walk-in icebox, but a soldier tracked him down, dragged him out, and beat him badly.

  Paul Y. Anderson remarked of the killing of the unarmed workman, who was shot in the back, “It was entirely murder.” Meehan, who was later indicted for murder, denied that he had given any orders at all.4

  Most city police, including several black policemen, reported to duty at their usual times on Monday, July 3. Two teams of detectives—one white, one black—were sent on to the area of Tenth and Bond, where Coppedge and Wodley had been shot fatally, to look for evidence and talk to potential witnesses. The white policemen, who had been told to look for evidence while the black policemen interviewed black residents, found several used shotgun shells mingled with a considerable amount of trash in the gutter. The waxed paper shells were slit by a sharp blade—apparently altered to deliver a more deadly blow.

  Meanwhile, a black policeman, John Eubanks, discovered that no blacks remained near Tenth and Bond. Walking farther afield, he finally found a man willing to talk if his name was never revealed. Eubanks promised to keep his identity secret, and subsequently refused to reveal the name or the race of his informant, even under oath.

  To the policeman’s surprise and sad dismay, the informant told Eubanks that a young man named Nathaniel Peebles had been in the crowd of shooters on July 2. Eubanks had known Nathaniel Peebles “since he was a boy in knee pants,” he said later, and had never known him to make trouble. Eu-banks and another black policeman went to the young man’s house and searched it. They found a shotgun and a half-empty box of shells. The shells were identical in make and gauge to the shells found at Tenth and Bond, and the sides had been slit to deliver a more deadly blow. Eubanks arrested Peebles. Investigations by Eubanks and other black policemen led to the arrest of several other young black men, including George Roberts, whom Eubanks had also known for most of the boy’s life. “I never knew him to commit a crime of any kind b
efore,” Eubanks said later. “That boy worked continuously. I never knew him to loaf a week in years.” Neither Peebles nor Roberts had criminal records. Eventually twenty-one blacks were indicted for murder in the deaths of the policemen, many of them young men with no criminal records. Some of the indictments were later dropped.5

  Eubanks also looked into the charge that blacks had rallied to the ringing of a church bell. The dearth of willing black witnesses, Eubanks said, made it difficult for him to say for sure whether or not a church bell had rung shortly before the police were shot. His impression, however, was that a bell rang at a church in the South End to signal the end to Sunday evening services, not as a rallying call. But he also conceded that blacks believed so strongly that an invasion by an armed white mob was imminent that the bell could have served as an alert whether it was intended that way or not.

  When asked his opinion on why a mob of blacks with guns were standing at Tenth and Bond around midnight, Eubanks said, “Well, my opinion is that they got together for the purpose of protecting their neighborhood.”6

  City police also arrested and jailed several black leaders on riot charges, although the man who was widely accused of being the leader of the blacks who had shot Coppedge and Wodley, Leroy Bundy, was nowhere to be found. Among those arrested (although he was later released) was Dr. Lyman Bluitt, who, along with Bundy, repeatedly had warned city officials that the wave of attacks on blacks could well lead to racial violence, and who had worked through the night of the riot at St. Mary’s hospital to save the lives of both whites and blacks. According to the East St. Louis Daily Journal, federal agents were questioning black leaders like Bluitt about suspicions that the “uprising” by blacks had been part of “a well-organized plot” by German agents, working with a “clique” of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, “to bring about a revolution … which would materially affect East St. Louis industries manufacturing war supplies.” In fact, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation—later known as the FBI—did look into suspicions that enemy agents or nationally organized political radicals had played a role in the riot, and found no evidence to support the allegations.7

  The death of Wodley, who never regained consciousness, would bring the toll of the dead to at least forty-eight, including thirty-nine black men, women, and children. But that figure was widely considered to be absurdly low. There had been many reports of blacks being chased onto the Free Bridge and forced over the side into the swift and deep and muddy waters of the Mississippi. There were also reports of black corpses being thrown off the bridge. No bodies were recovered from the river, which means little. Not just drowning victims and suicides but horses, steamships, automobiles, and, in modern times, even helicopters and their occupants have been known to disappear after plunging into the treacherous Mississippi at St. Louis.8

  Because thousands of blacks had arrived in the city in the past three years, many of them undocumented, and thousands had fled during the riot, many of them never to return, it would have been virtually impossible to determine who was missing and presumed dead. The NAACP and the Chicago Defender, both of which had investigators on the scene interviewing survivors shortly after the riot, estimated the death toll at between one and two hundred. Reporters for the black weekly, the St. Louis Argus, and several reporters for white dailies agreed that the death toll exceeded one hundred. The St. Clair County grand jury that would later convene would set the death toll at close to one hundred.9

  On the morning of July 3, as John Eubanks was rounding up and arresting the sons of his friends and neighbors, the smoldering riot would, from time to time, burst again into flame. Reverend George Allison had been called to city hall to help with the roughly twelve hundred refugees camped in and around it, and occasionally he heard reports of another attack on blacks, or another building torched. “They were burning property as late as three o’clock in the afternoon of the Third,” he said later.10

  The Red Cross was trying to help the displaced blacks, providing emergency food and medicine and taking as many as practicable to larger emergency centers across the river in St. Louis. Husbands were separated from wives and mothers from children and didn’t know whether they were dead or alive. Allison kept track of some of these cases of missing relatives, and decided a few weeks after the riot that the death toll was one hundred at the absolute lowest, and could have been as high as three hundred. After many tours of the riot areas, he decided that many black bodies, particularly those of small children who were still missing, simply had been cremated. Allison bemoaned the fact that there had been no systematic checking of missing people with police reports from other cities and states. (After some study, the state fire marshal remained unconvinced that any bodies, no matter how tiny, had completely gone up in smoke.)11

  On July 3, the East St. Louis chamber of commerce met and formed, basically from its own membership, the Committee of One Hundred to help the city recover from the riot. There were only two members from labor groups, and no blacks. There were, however, plenty of men with close ties to the Aluminum Ore Company and to Swift and Armour, as well as to railroads that later admitted luring blacks North with false promises. There were many with ties to the thoroughly corrupt bipartisan political machine and its farcical legal system as well. The membership of the group included lawyers who would represent accused killers and policemen in trials growing out of the riots.12

  Early that afternoon, in response to prodding from an editor, reporter Roy Albertson of the St. Louis Republic drove out to Tenth and Market, near where the two policemen had been shot fatally, and asked about numerous reports of carloads of white men joyriding through the neighborhood shooting into homes. Albertson called his editor and told him he had checked out the rumor, which had been reported in other papers, and it was untrue. No one he talked to said they had heard or seen anything like that. It was later revealed that he had only interviewed white people.13

  Three hundred miles to the north of East St. Louis, the Chicago morning papers on July 3 were full of news about the riot. The Negro Fellowship League met in a packed library on State Street at nine thirty A.M. and passed a resolution condemning the rioters and calling for a biracial conference to try and breach the terrible gulf that had opened up between the races. At the end of the meeting, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who had presided, said the participants could sing “America” or “The Star Spangled Banner” if they wished. No one sang a note. A total of $8.65 was collected to send Wells-Barnett to East St. Louis as an investigator. She left the next day.14

  On the afternoon of July 3, Governor Frank Lowden arrived in East St. Louis and toured the city. The next day, he said, “I have been weighted down since I visited those hospitals last night, since I saw those charred ruins of homes, since I saw the havoc this riot wrought… A stain rests upon Illinois—a stain that will remain … We in the North have been in the habit of frequently criticizing our Southern friends for their treatment of the Negro … I tell you that I know of no outrages that have been perpetrated in the South that surpass the conditions I found in East St. Louis, in our beloved state.”15

  More than one thousand troops were in place by the evening of July 3, enough to insure that rioters and arsonists were dealt with swiftly and decisively, and, except for very minor incidents, the riot was over. A stunned peace came over the city, and for the next week or so there was very little crime.

  On the evening of July 4, Ida B. Wells-Barnett took an overnight train from Chicago to East St. Louis. She arrived early the next morning and quickly was in the streets, despite a warning by a black conductor in her Pullman car that she might be killed. A short, matronly looking woman in her mid-fifties with four children, Wells-Barnett was a fearless veteran of the fight for federal antilynching legislation who had documented the murder of blacks in some of the most virulently racist regions of the South. Refusing to be intimidated because of her gender or race, she had withdrawn in anger from the NAACP after it became clear that she and othe
r outspoken blacks were considered too radical for leadership positions by the white men and women who dominated the organization in its early years.

  In the three-block walk up Missouri Avenue from the rail station to city hall through what was once a lively black urban neighborhood and now was a burnt-out wasteland, she did not see a single black person. She asked a young white soldier standing on a corner how things were. “Bad,” he replied. What, she asked, was the trouble? “The Negroes won’t let the whites alone,” he said bitterly. “They killed seven yesterday and three already this morning.”

  Wells-Barnett met dozens of black female refugees at city hall, and helped them with their few belongings as the Red Cross and other relief agencies carried them across the river in St. Louis, where thousands of black men, women, and children stood and sat and lay in and around the Municipal Lodging House, where food and medical treatment were available.16 Many of the stories she heard were devastatingly similar. The victims were ordinary black housewives and mothers whose husbands had low-paying jobs, or were looking for work. Many of the women took in laundry or worked as maids. Wives and children had been separated from their husbands on July 2, and they had survived by hiding in basements and garages and sheds and open fields, sometimes—but rarely—helped by white neighbors. Most of them had scrimped for years to be able to afford such necessities as a bedstead or a dining room table, and now everything was gone.

  “Every which way we turned there were women and children and men, dazed over the thing that had come to them and unable to tell what it was all about,” Wells-Barnett wrote later. “They lined the streets or were standing out on the grassy banks of the lawns that surrounded the city hall or stood in groups discussing their experiences… these people who had suddenly been robbed of everything except what they stood in.”17