Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  At the end of a long, exhausting, and embittering day going back and forth between the two cities, Wells-Barnett discovered there was no place in East St. Louis for her to stay. She picked up her suitcase and took a streetcar to St. Louis, where, despite her protests, she was swept up in a group of East St. Louis blacks who were taken in a police wagon to the Municipal Lodging House for mandatory vaccination against smallpox. A teacher from Chicago who was working as a volunteer at the vaccination center recognized her, believed her when she said she had already been vaccinated for smallpox in considerably more sanitary conditions, and helped her get out of the lodging house and to a home in a black neighborhood where she could spend the night.

  In her riot report, Wells-Barnett quoted extensively from Carlos Hurd’s first-person account of the hanging in the middle of downtown to illustrate the horror of the events of July 2. She returned to Chicago on July 8, and she and a number of black and liberal leaders in that city and across the country joined in a plea to the president of the United States to initiate a federal investigation of the riot in East St. Louis. The White House and the office of the attorney general were inundated with telegrams and letters calling for a federal investigation and federal action, at long last, on antilynching legislation.

  The East St. Louis race riot also triggered a national debate about race and the labor movement after it came up on July 6 at Carnegie Hall, where former president Theodore Roosevelt got into a ferocious argument with Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor. The occasion was an official greeting of a delegation from the revolutionary Provisional Government of Russia.

  “Before we speak of justice for others,” said Roosevelt, “it behooves us to do justice within our own household. Within a week there has been an appalling outbreak of savagery in a race riot at East St. Louis, a race riot for which, as far as we can see, there was no real provocation.” Gompers reacted to Roosevelt’s remarks by insisting that there had been plenty of provocation. He blamed the violence on “reactionary” employers who had imported black strikebreakers from the South. “The luring of these colored men to East St. Louis is on a par with the behavior of the brutal, reactionary and tyrannous forces that existed in Old Russia,” he declared.

  Samuel Gompers

  Roosevelt stirred restlessly in his chair as Gompers spoke, and when the labor leader was through the former president jumped up and shook his fist in Gompers’s face and condemned him for trying to justify the riot. He thundered, “I am not willing that a meeting called to commemorate the birth of democracy in Russia shall even seem to have expressed or to have accepted apologies for the brutal infamies imposed on colored people.”

  Much of the large crowd, which had initially cheered the popular expresident, booed and hissed as his fist came so close to Gompers that it appeared to many that he had punched him in the mouth. But then another part of the audience began cheering, and the call and response of boos and cheers went back and forth as if the event was a college football game.

  The New York Times, in a long, page-one story, noted, “It was not a mere quarrel between Roosevelt and Gompers, it was a division in the crowd—a crowd gathered together from all the friends of new Russia—Socialists and workmen who saw chiefly the economic provocation of the riot, and members of other classes who had more feeling of the horror.”18

  Several miles north of Carnegie Hall, at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, Hubert H. Harrison, who just the month before had broken with the Socialist Party to found the militant Liberty League of Negro Americans, called for blacks to arm themselves for protection in the wake of the East St. Louis riots. To repeated applause and cheers from a black audience of about one thousand, Harrison declared that the time had come to stop violence with violence.

  “They are saying a great deal about democracy in Washington now,” he proclaimed, “but while they are talking about fighting for freedom and the Stars and Stripes, here at home the whites apply the torch to the black men’s homes, and their bullets, clubs and stones to their bodies … We intend to fight, if fight we must, for the things dearest to us, for our hearths and homes. Certainly, I would encourage the Negroes in the South or in East St. Louis or anywhere else who do not enjoy the protection of the law to arm for their own defense, to hide those arms, and to learn how to use them.”19

  Closer to home, the Chicago Tribune looked to the atrocity in southern Illinois and judged that “the blood of victims spatters the state.” And the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, in a raging editorial headlined THE SHAME OF ILLINOIS, called the East St. Louis riots “a disgrace to that city, a disgrace to Illinois, a disgrace to America [and] a disgrace to humanity … The often condemned mobs of the South have always had as their purpose the quick and effective punishment of crime … composed of determined men who thought that the law was too slow and too uncertain … Such acts are in violation of fundamental principles of orderly government and as such should not be tolerated, but in comparison with the unspeakable outrages in East St. Louis, they are righteousness itself.”20

  In the South, many politicians and newspapers were less judicious in comparing the East St. Louis rioters unfavorably to lynch mobs. And they saw one lesson above all others. It was time for blacks to come home to the Land of Cotton, where white people knew how to treat blacks. Some Southerners seemed barely able to restrain themselves from gloating as they proclaimed that the riot proved that keeping the races separate was the only way to avert racial warfare. Some even strongly suggested that an occasional lynching helped keep unruly blacks in line. In Georgia, a state representative introduced a resolution sarcastically bowing to the “superior judgment” of Illinois in its dealings with blacks, but “earnestly recommended that they do select their victims one at a time and be sure of their guilt before they act.”21

  Somewhat more elegantly, the Atlanta Constitution editorialized:

  Others may disconcert the negro by painting before his eyes a roseate picture of broadened rights and racial equality to be enjoyed in the North, but in the South a negro never yet was killed simply because he wanted to work and earn a living for himself and family by honest toil! And it looks as though, by employing their own methods, those rapid solvers of the negro question in Lincoln’s state have set for themselves a more perplexing race problem than the South ever thought of. Before they get through with it, it is probable that they will become convinced that our way is the best way of all.

  As to those colored folk who have escaped with their lives, they had better come back home, where they were well off. And those who have not gone North can thank their lucky stars that they have stuck in the South, where every man is safeguarded in the right to work—and to live in peace and security if he works and leads the life of a decent respectable citizen.

  The Constitution did not touch on the facts that lynch law still ruled the South and that only the most menial and low-paying jobs in the region were open to blacks.22

  Among those calling for a federal investigation, despite a history of allegiance to “states rights,” was the notorious racist Senator Benjamin R. Till-man of South Carolina, who gloated on the floor of the Senate that the East St. Louis riots had demonstrated the truth of his tireless contention that the North was not all that different from the South in its hatred of blacks. And more riots could be expected, he said, as long as the doomed policy of granting legal equality to inferior blacks continued. “The average Yankee,” he said, “has no love of the negro, except for political reasons… The North is now beginning to understand the South, and to understand the race problem … The more the northern people know of the negro, the less they like him. I have epitomized it by saying ‘they love him according to the square of the distance.’ The further off he is, the better they like him.”

  When resentment at losing jobs to “foreign-born competition” was added to the hatred of blacks, he said, “The white blood, once aroused, grows savage and very cruel.” The black man, he contended, “must remain
subordinate or be exterminated.”23

  “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, now ill and feeble in his seventieth year but still simmering with demagogic passion, had made his political reputation as a young man during Reconstruction in the so-called Hamburg Riots. He led a white supremacist paramilitary group that wore cavalry sabers for show but also carried guns. They shot and killed six black militiamen who were deemed to be flaunting their freedom by parading through a small South Carolina town.

  Social worker Roger Baldwin, who earlier that year had moved from St. Louis to New York and founded the organization that became the American Civil Liberties Union, had spent the past five years as secretary of the St. Louis Civic League, a reform agency that worked with the NAACP to fight segregation and racism. Baldwin knew East St. Louis far too well, and, although he did not deny the effect of “uncontrolled race prejudice in a labor struggle,” he had no doubt where to lay the major share of blame for the riot. In the national social work journal the Survey, he wrote:

  East St. Louis is probably the most finished example of corporation-owned city government in the United States… East St. Louis’s failure to control the recent outbreak of race violence is only her long-standing failure to control every form of violence and lawlessness. It is due directly to the exploitation of the East St. Louis city government by selfish business interests… All that the business interests need is a city government that will give them the privileges they want, and then let them alone. The politicians and the underworld can have the rest.24

  A number of black writers and artists were moved by the East St. Louis riot. Outraged and saddened by reports of the black child being thrown into a burning building, Lola Ridge, a Harlem poet, wrote a bitterly ironic poem called “Lullabye” that concluded:

  Rock-a-by baby—higher an’ higher!

  Mammy is sleeping and daddy’s run lame.

  (Soun’ may you sleep in yo’ cradle o ’fire!)

  Rock-a-by baby, hushed in the flame.25

  In East St. Louis, a jittery peace prevailed despite persistent rumors that mobs of blacks were on their way from Brooklyn, Illinois, or Chicago or somewhere to exact revenge. On the evening of the Fourth of July, a motorcyclist in police uniform rode like Paul Revere through some white neighborhoods, warning of an imminent black invasion, and some residents prepared to flee. But word of the false alarm reached the National Guard headquarters downtown and General Dickson immediately sent soldiers to protect and calm the neighborhoods. No attack came—indeed, at that point very few black faces were visible in most of East St. Louis.26

  The emptiness and devastation of once-lively black neighborhoods was overwhelming to visitors like Oscar Leonard, head of a St. Louis Jewish charity, who called the riot “the East St. Louis Pogrom” and observed, “It was a distressing sight to see block after block where peaceful homes had been located burned to the ground. The innocent suffered with the guilty. Thrifty black folk, who were doing their bit by raising vegetables, were murdered. I saw the ruins of their homes, into which had gone the labor and savings of years. The little thrift gardens had escaped the flames and orderly rows where seeds had been planted gave the plots the appearance of miniature graveyards.”27

  As the days passed and a few blacks returned to jobs in downtown East St. Louis, meat cutter Earl Jimmerson began to worry about the young black porter he had warned to leave town at the Illmo Hotel the morning of July 2. The man he knew only as “Herb” had disappeared that morning and had not reappeared. Then, one day in mid-July, Herb was back, working his usual spot in the lobby of the hotel. Jimmerson asked if he and his family were okay. Herb smiled and nodded and thanked Jimmerson, but would not tell him where they had been during the massacre.28

  St. Clair County state’s attorney Hubert Schaumleffel, a political crony of Mollman, announced that indictments of rioters would be difficult to get out of a grand jury. For one thing, he suggested, most people likely to be on the grand jury—”respectable white men” was the implication—thought the riots, despite the terrible toll in life and property, were not necessarily a bad thing. Besides, he didn’t have any witnesses, at least none who would name names. Some East St. Louisans complained about Schaumleffel’s attitude to Governor Frank Lowden, and Lowden dispatched assistant attorney general C. W. Middlekauf to prosecute the important cases. “Think of it,” Middlekauf told the East St. Louis chamber of commerce. “The greatest crime in the history of the state and the state’s attorney told me he had no witnesses a week after the riot.” Middlekauf took charge of the grand jury investigation. Ten investigators were dispatched from around the state to interview witnesses.29

  On July 8, W. E. B. Du Bois took the train from New York to East St. Louis along with social worker Martha Gruening to investigate the riot on behalf of the NAACP. They assembled a staff of more than two dozen investigators, both paid and volunteer, setting up offices at the St. Louis headquarters of the black Knights of Pythias, a fraternal lodge.30 Initially, Du Bois and Gruening interviewed Mayor Mollman and other civic and business leaders, and grew increasingly infuriated as the white men affixed much of the blame to a few black agitators like Dr. Leroy Bundy. Thenceforth, they concentrated most of their efforts on interviewing ordinary witnesses, black and white. They stayed for about a week. Aflame with anger after hearing dozens of tales of horrible abuse and murder, Du Bois began writing about the riot as soon as the train had pulled out of East St. Louis. The words continued to spill out of him during the trip to New York, and long afterward:

  Yesterday I rode in East St. Louis. It is the kind of place one quickly recognizes—tireless, with no restful green of verdure; hard and uneven of street; crude, cold, and even hateful of aspect; conventional of course in its business quarter, but quickly beyond one sees the ruts and hollows, the stench of ill-tamed sewerage, unguarded railroad crossings, saloons outnumbering churches and churches catering to saloons; homes impudently strait and new, prostitutes free and happy, gangsters in paradise, the town ‘wide open,’ shameless and frank; great factories pouring out stench, filth and flame … I rode in this city past flame-swept walls and over gray ashes; in streets almost wet with blood and beside ruins, where the bones of dead men new bleached peered out at me in sullen wonder.

  Across the river, [St. Louis] is larger and older and the forces of evil have had some curbing from those who have seen the vision and panted for love; but eastward from St. Louis there is a land of no taxes for great industries; there is a land where you may buy grafting politicians at far less rate than you would pay for franchises or privileges in a modern town … always there was theft and rumors of theft until St. Clair county was a hissing in good men’s ears.31

  In a passionate and painfully detailed report of more than eight thousand words in the September issue of the Crisis—accompanied with photographs, the coverage spread over twenty-four pages—Du Bois blamed the riot on the labor unions as well as the capitalists and the crooked politicians who served them. He quoted extensively from Carlos Hurd’s first-person account in the Post-Dispatch. Estimating the death toll at “between one and two hundred human beings who were black,” including a dozen or more men, women, and children who had sought shelter in the basement of an old opera house that was subsequently destroyed by fire, Du Bois recounted the results of his team’s interviews with dozens of survivors:

  One dares not dwell too long on these horrors… . Mrs. Luella Cox (white) of the Volunteers of America… had gone over to East St. Louis on that memorable day and … saw a Negro beheaded with a butcher’s knife by someone in a crowd standing near the Free Bridge. The crowd had to have its jest. So its members laughingly threw the head over one side of the bridge and the body over the other.

  A trolley car came along. The crowd forced its inmates to put their hands out the window. Colored people thus recognized were hauled out of the car to be beaten, trampled on, shot. A little 12-year-old colored girl fainted—her mother knelt beside her. The crowd surged in on her. When its ranks opened up ag
ain Mrs. Cox saw the mother prostrate with a hole as large as one’s fist in her head.

  He told the stories of more than two dozen blacks who ran for their lives or hid in coal sheds or cellars or under beds as their homes were looted and burned, and men, women, and children were beaten and killed all around them. He quoted at length a twenty-six-year-old black woman named Beatrice Deshong, who recounted in matter-of-fact language the most horrible sights:

  I saw the mob robbing the homes of Negroes and then set fire to them. The soldier stood with folded arms and looked on as the houses burned. I saw a Negro man killed instantly by a member of the mob, men, small boys, and women and little girls all were trying to do something to injure the Negroes… The police and the soldiers were assisting the mob to kill Negroes and to destroy their homes. I saw the mob hang a colored man to a telegraph pole and riddle him with bullets. I saw the mob chasing a colored man who had a baby in his arms. The mob was shooting at him all of the time as long as I saw him. I ran for my life. I was nearly exhausted when a white man in the block opened the door of his warehouse and told me to go in there and hide. I went in and stayed there the night. The mob bombarded the house during the night, but I was not discovered nor hurt. The mob stole the jewelry of Negroes and used axes and hatchets to chop up pianos and furniture that belonged to them. The mob was seemingly well arranged to do their desperate work. I recognized some of the wealthy people’s sons and some of the bank officials in the mob. They were as vile as they could be.

  Martha Gruening talked to white soldiers who admitted they disarmed blacks of guns, knives, and razors while not bothering whites armed with rifles, pistols, knives, and clubs. “Miss Gruening,” Du Bois wrote, “wanted to know if they hadn’t disarmed any whites at all.”