Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  “They were doubtful. Yes, one remembered he had disarmed a drunken white man who was attacking a white woman.”

  Near the end of her interviews, Martha Gruening came upon a frail, elderly black woman picking through the burned ruins of what had been her house, looking futilely for anything worth saving. “What are we to do?” the old woman asked. “We can’t live South, and they don’t want us North. Where are we to go?”

  Du Bois ended the report with the words, “And what of the Federal Government?” The question was purely rhetorical. After East St. Louis, the forty-nine-year-old Du Bois had little if any faith remaining in the white institutions of the United States of America, official or unofficial.32

  A few months later, still obsessed with what he had seen and heard in East St. Louis, Du Bois wrote in the Crisis an essay entitled “The Black Man and the Unions”:

  I am among the few colored men who have tried conscientiously to bring about understanding and co-operation between American Negroes and the Labor Unions… I carry on the title page, for instance, of this magazine the Union label, and yet I know, and everyone of my Negro readers knows, that the very fact that this label is there is an advertisement that no Negro’s hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine, since the International Typographical Union systematically and deliberately excludes every Negro that it dares from membership, no matter what his qualifications.

  Even here, however, and beyond the hurt of mine own, I have always striven to recognize the real cogency of the Union argument. Collective bargaining has, undoubtedly, raised modern labor from something like chattel slavery to the threshold of industrial freedom, and in this advance of labor white and black have shared. I have tried, therefore to see a vision of vast union between the laboring forces, particularly in the South, and hoped for no distant day when the black laborer and the white laborer, instead of being used against each other as helpless pawns, should unite to bring real democracy in the South …

  The whole scheme … of playing off black workers against white … is essentially a mischievous and dangerous program … but it is particularly disheartening to realize that it is the Labor Unions themselves that have given this movement its greatest impulse, and that today, at last, in East St. Louis have brought the most unwilling of us to acknowledge that in the present Union movement, as represented by the American Federation of Labor, there is absolutely no hope of justice for an American of Negro descent.33

  Despite pleas for a federal investigation from dozens of prominent political, religious, business, and labor leaders, and a hand-delivered petition from the NAACP containing fifteen thousand signatures that called for an investigation and federal antilynching legislation, President Woodrow Wilson continued to ignore the riot. Prominent blacks led by James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the NAACP, decided to catch the president’s attention and perhaps force his hand with an unprecedented demonstration in America’s largest city. They waited until Du Bois had returned to New York from East St. Louis and, on Saturday, July 28, Du Bois and Johnson joined eight to ten thousand blacks in marching down Fifth Avenue to the funereal beat of muffled drums in a silent protest against the riot and horrific torture lynching in Memphis and Waco, Texas, calling for immediate action on federal anti-lynching legislation. Some of the marchers carried signs addressed to Wilson:

  The Silent Parade along Fifth Avenue in New York City

  MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?

  PRAY FOR THE LADY MACBETHS OF EAST ST. LOUIS

  YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD

  The Silent Parade was America’s first major civil rights march. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis has written, “It seems inconceivable today that this was the first time a procession such as this had been seen in New York City … The Silent Parade, captured in a widely reprinted photograph, was the second impressive sign [after the picketing of The Birth of a Nation] that there existed an aggressive national civil rights organization representing black people.” Along the parade route of more than twenty blocks, black Boy Scouts handed out fliers that proclaimed, “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis and East St. Louis, by rousing the conscience of the country and bringing the murderers of our brothers, sisters and innocent children to justice.”34

  The Silent Parade inspired blacks across America and, along with the riot in East St. Louis, became a primal element in the memory of a race only half a century out of slavery, a memory that persisted through the decades. In the 1930s, growing up almost six hundred miles east of East St. Louis in Lorain, Ohio, a legendary stop on the Underground Railroad, young Toni Morrison heard the stories and, like Miles Davis of East St. Louis, she never forgot what she had been told about the summer when whites slaughtered blacks in the state of Abraham Lincoln and thousands of African Americans marched in protest down white America’s wealthiest avenue. The riot hovers like a dark force over her 1992 novel, Jazz, whose doomed central character—perhaps based in part on Josephine Baker—survives the riot that killed her parents and burned her childhood home to the ground, but never feels safe, even in the midst of America’s largest black city, Harlem.

  Morrison’s protagonist, a girl named Dorcas, is so shattered by the experience of the riot that she cannot speak of it. She stands silently with her aunt Alice in Harlem for three hours and watches the Silent Parade, the two of them “marveling at the cold black faces and listening to drums saying what the graceful women and the marching men could not… It was July in 1917 and the beautiful faces were cold and quiet; moving slowly into the space the drums were building for them … down Fifth Avenue from curb to curb, came a tide of cold black faces, speechless and unblinking because what they had meant to say but did not trust themselves to say the drums said for them.”35

  Among the organizers of the Silent Parade was Madam C. J. Walker, who had become wealthy manufacturing and selling hair- and skin-care products for black women. She, like many others, saw the East St. Louis riot as simply lynching on a large scale, and it struck a particularly strong emotional note within her. She had lived and worked for sixteen years in St. Louis as a young woman, and had friends on both sides of the Mississippi. Two of Walker’s best friends from those days worked as volunteers caring for the thousands of refugees who fled East St. Louis, and they had heartrending stories to tell.36

  Three days after the Silent Parade, Madam Walker joined James Weldon Johnson and other black leaders in a trip to Washington. Their intention, they announced, was to meet with the president to protest “the atrocious attacks… at East St. Louis and other industrial centers recently,” saying they represented not only “the colored people of Greater New York” but “the sentiments and aspirations and sorrows, too, of the entire Negro population of the United States.” Promised a meeting with Wilson himself, they planned to urge the president to “speak some public word that would give hope and courage to the Negroes of the United States,” but when the committee reached the White House they were informed that Wilson was too busy in negotiations over a farm bill to see them. They met instead with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who had advised Wilson in private that if he addressed the issues of lynching and the East St. Louis riot, “the fire will be re-kindled.”37

  Madam C. J. Walker

  In their petition to the president, the delegation stressed black loyalty to the United States, pointing out that a higher proportion of blacks than whites had registered for the recent draft, and they implored Wilson to use “his great personal and moral influence in our behalf.” Noting that the law had not punished “a single one” of the lynchers responsible for the murder of “2,867 colored men and women” since 1885, they asked that “lynching and mob violence be made a national crime punishable by the laws of the United States,” adding, “No nation that seeks to fight the battles of civilization can afford to march in blood-smeared garments.”

  After being assured by Tumulty that the president was “in sympathy”
with American blacks, the delegation was dismissed, and Madam Walker, Johnson, and the other members of the ad hoc committee went to Capitol Hill, where several congressman agreed that an investigation should be held of the East St. Louis riot. Among them was Republican representative L. C. Dyer, who not only had been horrified by the riot but fretted that people not from his area would confuse East St. Louis, Illinois, with the city he represented, St. Louis, Missouri. Dyer had already introduced a resolution calling for a congressional investigation of the riot and began working with civil rights leaders on legislation to make lynching a federal crime. He first introduced what came to be called the Dyer Bill in 1918, although it would be several years before any congressional action was taken on it.38

  Missouri Representative L. C. Dyer

  Despite the appeals of black leaders and many prominent whites, Wilson decided there wasn’t enough evidence that federal laws had been violated to justify an investigation of a riot that killed at least forty-eight people and shut down one of the nation’s main transportation hubs. A majority of the House of Representatives thought differently. In response to Dyer’s resolution, the Committee to Investigate Conditions in Illinois and Missouri Interfering with Interstate Commerce Between Said States was formed, and five congressmen were named to it.

  In the meantime, Illinois assistant attorney general C. W. Middlekauf had been busy in St. Clair County with his riot grand jury. On August 14, 105 people—eighty white men, eight of them policemen; two white women; and twenty-three black men—were indicted on charges growing out of the riot. Thirty-two men were charged with murder. Several weeks later, thirty-nine more persons were indicted, most of them white men, including Mayor Fred Mollman, who was charged with malfeasance. Other charges ranged from arson and assault with intent to murder to “malicious mischief.”39

  In a long report, the all-white grand jury, which consisted mainly of German-American farmers and small businessmen from rural St. Clair County, traced the riot to the anger created by the importation of thousands of black workers from the South by East St. Louis industry, and particularly cited the use of black strikebreakers at the Aluminum Ore Company. “[T]he intent of employers to place the workers of one race at a disadvantage by notoriously favoring workers of another must draw down condemnation. The natural result was to precipitate a new form of aversion to the negro.”40

  The jury, which had interviewed 390 witnesses, charged that unnamed “agitators” kept race hatred stirred up among both blacks and whites until it finally exploded. Meanwhile, “as racial tensions grew, indolent public officials heard the rumblings, but, overawed by cowardly inclinations, remained inactive.”

  The jury reported that, on the evening before the July riot, not just one but two automobiles of white gunmen “made a number of trips” through black neighborhoods firing into the homes of blacks:

  Engendered with false fears, negroes wantonly murdered policemen bent on aiding them. A rival flame of passion and unreasoning violence—all introduced into the community by intriguing ringleaders—caused white men to draw guns and clubs and shoot and beat to death some of the oldest and most respected negro citizens of East St. Louis—negroes who had lived and worked in the community for a long time preceding the period of emigration of which the community has heard so much. We further believe that the hand of a strong and fearless public official could have restrained these atrocities.

  The grand jury estimated that nearly one hundred people were killed, and 245 buildings were burned down. “East St. Louis was visited by one of the worst race riots in history, a siege of murder, brutality, arson and other crimes hitherto of such loathsome character as to challenge belief. But it is now doubly so because, after hearing all evidence, we believe the riots—at least the occurrences which led up to them—were deliberately plotted … There is a grave suspicion that a shrewd, criminal, invisible hand directed all the moves for weeks prior to July 2, to effect the results obtained.”

  This was an extraordinary and shocking charge. Although the grand jury specifically blamed major industrialists in—or rather around—East St. Louis for stirring up racial hatred by bringing in excessive numbers of black workers, the panel did not identify the men wielding the “criminal, invisible hand” nor did it explain who could have benefited from the riot in the long run and thus have a motive to get it started. However, the point was made that one of the cars that drove gunmen through black neighborhoods on July 1, triggering the attack on the police car and its tragic consequences, ended up in front of the Commercial Hotel, which was “controlled by a leading politician.”41

  Nothing further was said, either directly or by implication, about either political boss Locke Tarlton or his real estate partner, Thomas Canavan. But it is worth noting that, on the morning of July 3, with smoke hanging heavy in the air and angry white mobs still in the streets, the Reverend George Allison ran into Canavan, and remarked, “Mr. Canavan, this is deplorable. This is a terrible situation.”

  “Yes,” Canavan replied, “but my GOD, something has got to be done, or the damn niggers will take the town.”

  After talking to powerful citizens like Canavan, Allison said later, “I became convinced there was a concerted effort to run the negroes out of East St. Louis”—not necessarily to kill them, he added, but to scare them so badly that they would never return.42

  What about the widespread destruction of property owned by Tarlton and Canavan? According to both the Post-Dispatch and the Journal, the standard fire insurance policies of the period were void if the fire was caused by riot or insurrection. However, under Illinois law, the city could be held liable for damages for failure to provide protection from the rioters. Indeed, by July of 1921, the city of East St. Louis had paid $454,000 to liquidate claims growing out of the 1917 riot.43

  The dozens of men and women indicted by the grand jury included a seventeen-year-old newsboy, a forty-nine-year-old blacksmith, a coal dealer, a railroad switchman, a baker, a bartender, and a saloonkeeper, as well as many men with no reported means of support. The predominance of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and German last names suggests that recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not play a major role in the riot. The youngest indicted were two fourteen-year-old boys. Most of the others were in their late teens or twenties, but several were in their forties—including forty-six-year-old Richard Brockway and Dr. I. H. King, a forty-three-year-old black physician indicted in the Coppedge killing. Many could not be arrested immediately because they had left town before the indictments had been issued. Some had joined the army, and those indicted on major charges who were not on a ship to France or already at the front were arrested and brought back to East St. Louis to stand trial.44

  At least some of those who were arrested—perhaps as many as one third—lived outside of East St. Louis. None of those indicted on major charges worked for the Aluminum Ore Company, despite the role the company and its workers played in building up the white rage triggered by the riot. The rioters seem to defy classification, beyond the general observation that they tended to be men who worked with their hands or didn’t work at all, at least not at anything legal.

  Numerous people testified that Richard Brockway had called for and led attacks on blacks on July 2. Brockway was among the first arrested, and the hulking, headstrong security guard was injudiciously—but typically, it seems—garrulous about his role in the riot. He told the Post-Dispatch that he had indeed led a group of men to the Labor Temple on the morning of July 2, but that his intent was to talk them into calming down and going home. He said he had gone into the South End the day before on official business for the streetcar company and had noticed that blacks were heavily armed. He insisted he warned the crowd at the Temple that “they would probably all be killed if they went into the neighborhood.” Brockway said he left the meeting and went to his home a few blocks north of downtown and had urged others to do the same. He said he did not come back downtown until the following morning. Several witnesses testi
fied otherwise. Brockway was indicted for conspiracy to riot and assault with intent to kill, and his lawyers began a series of legal challenges that would delay his trial until mid-November.

  Brockway was born in 1871 in the mountains of northern California, the son of a failed gold prospector. He lived most of his life in East St. Louis, although, according to some reports, he had spent some time in the South and publicly stated that he approved of the repressive treatment of blacks in that part of the country. He had worked with his father in the family grocery business and then sold liquor on his own for a few years, but apparently he did not succeed—at one point, he worked as a bartender for another man—and had taken a blue-collar job with a local railroad switching company. He was well known around town, a hail fellow well met, the grand vice protector of a fraternal lodge, the Knights and Ladies of Honor. He was a familiar figure at county Republican Party caucuses, but he jumped to Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party in 1912 to run unsuccessfully for sheriff. He would later describe the Republican state’s attorney, Hubert Schaumleffel, as a political rival who was “actively seeking his conviction” because Brockway had stood up to the East St. Louis bipartisan political machine controlled by real estate slum lord Locke Tarlton.45

  In 1911, he became a security guard for the East St. Louis and Suburban Streetcar Company. That year, a conductor was murdered by a black man. Whites were outraged. Labor leader Alois Towers testified that “the race feeling” had been “pronounced” after the murder. More recently, the streetcars in East St. Louis had been a focus of white complaints about blacks who did not “know their place.”46

  The riot trials were set to begin in mid-August, and the prosecution had chosen its first case carefully. A thirty-two-year-old white stockyard worker named S. L. Schulz, the son of a wealthy southern Illinois farmer, was charged with several serious offenses, including brutally clubbing a white meatpacker who had come to the aid of a besieged black co-worker. Witnesses were prepared to identify Schulz as the leader of the “Stockyards gang” of rioters, accused of killing several blacks. Because of the race of the victim, Schulz’s clubbing case seemed like an easy one to win, and he was one of the first to be prosecuted. After hearing jailhouse talk of harsh sentences in store for rioters—reportedly, he had overheard an official say that “hanging would be too good” for the rioters who had destroyed much of downtown—he chose to avoid a jury trial by confessing to the clubbing and pled guilty to assault to commit murder and conspiracy to riot. Other charges were dropped, but Judge George A. Crow startled him by sentencing him to fifteen years in the state penitentiary.47 Defense attorneys who might have been considering quick guilty pleas, hoping for light sentences for serious crimes, began asking for continuances, and no case actually came to trial until October.