Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  On August 22, Mother Jones, the radical labor leader, visited East St. Louis. She spoke to packinghouse workers at a hall barely a block from the Labor Temple, where Richard Brockway seven weeks earlier had stoked the fires of white racial hatred. For Mother Jones the audience of 150 included twenty-five policemen, most prominently new chief of police Frank Keating and new chief of detectives Lefty Neville. The Committee of One Hundred had successfully pressured the city to get rid of their riot-tainted predecessors.

  Labor leader Mother Jones

  Mother Jones urged that packinghouse workers—whose union had been destroyed by bringing in strikebreakers, many of them black—throw off the shackles of prejudice and join together, black and white, to affiliate themselves with organized labor. The meeting ended peacefully and without subsequent incident, although Mother Jones did make official ears perk up, bringing a standing ovation and prolonged applause from the seventy-five or eighty meatpackers in attendance by saying, “If we can’t get what we want without a riot, let’s have a riot.”48

  In fact, a riot—the second major race riot of the summer of 1917—did erupt the next day almost one thousand miles to the southwest, in Houston. The riot in Houston might well never have happened had it had not been for the one in East St. Louis, which hovered like a dark cloud over Houston.

  Like East St. Louis, Houston was patrolled by a police force that was considered corrupt and even dangerous by white citizens as well as blacks. Wartime pressures to clean up the vice-ridden city had resulted in racially selective enforcement of laws against prostitution and gambling, and there had been many charges in the first half of 1917 of police brutality against poor blacks. All year long and particularly that summer, according to historian Robert V. Haynes, blacks were almost routinely shot by police or falsely arrested for crimes they did not commit.49

  In late July, a battalion of soldiers from the black Twenty-fourth Infantry, which had distinguished itself in the Indian Wars and in skirmishes along the Mexican border, was sent from the border to Houston to guard a military base under construction north of the city. The base, Camp Logan, would be used to house National Guard troops activated for the European War. The black soldiers had followed the news from East St. Louis in daily newspapers and in the Chicago Defender and were so horrified and saddened by what they read that they set up a fund to collect money for the victims of the riot. They were very apprehensive about the move to Houston. If something that terrible happened in the home state of Lincoln, what awful things might await them deep in the heart of East Texas? And when they arrived from the Mexican border, they found themselves in a racist bastion of the Old South, a cotton port known for oppressive treatment of blacks, with strictly segregated, clearly labeled Jim Crow sections on the streetcars and toilets and water fountains. The soldiers objected to being treated like second-class citizens. In some cases, they objected loudly. In response, black soldiers were attacked by whites. Some were arrested on flimsy charges and beaten by police, routine treatment for men and women of color in Houston. But these men were soldiers in the uniforms of their nation, soldiers with a proud history of combat. They had been led to believe they were fighting for democracy. And they had access to weapons.

  On August 17, three advance companies from the Illinois National Guard, two from Chicago and one from downstate Carbondale, arrived at Camp Logan. All three units had seen duty at the riot in East St. Louis, and it was generally known among the black soldiers that Illinois guardsmen had stood by and let rioters kill blacks, and had even shot fleeing men. Some black soldiers, it was reported later, vowed they would “fix that bunch from the Chicago slums.”50

  The coil of racial tension was tightened further over the next five days as blacks routinely were assaulted on the streets of Houston by private citizens and by police, who reportedly had decided that the black soldiers, accustomed to more liberal treatment out west and in the Philippines, were a bad influence on Houston’s own blacks and needed to be taught a lesson. Particularly brutal were the mounted patrolmen, who were notorious for striking downward at the heads of blacks with heavy batons. One black soldier later recalled that his comrades had decided they would be jailed and beaten whether they did anything or not, so “they might as well fight it out.”51

  On the hot, muggy morning of August 23, a black military policeman was assaulted by Houston police after he protested their rough verbal and physical treatment of a black housewife in the city’s mostly black Fourth Ward. False rumors spread that a black soldier had been shot and killed, and that a white mob was advancing on the base to kill all the black soldiers. Men from the Illinois National Guard were issued a machine gun by white officers and stationed at an entrance to the camp in case whites really were heading that way.

  Seeing the white men from Illinois at the trigger of a machine gun did not inspire a sense of security in the black soldiers. Deciding they needed to act before an East St. Louis–style massacre took place, more than one hundred black soldiers grabbed rifles and marched toward Houston. Some of them may have been intent solely on repelling the rumored white mob, others on freeing one or more jailed black soldiers. But when they reached the Fourth Ward they began attacking policemen and, fairly quickly, other whites. Fierce gun battles ensued. The riot lasted barely two hours. Ironically, members of the Illinois National Guard were sent into the city to help quell the riot, and after the initial fury was expended, many black soldiers surrendered to the guardsmen rather than put themselves in the hands of the Houston Police Department.

  Fifteen whites, four of them policemen, were killed. So were four black soldiers. It was the first major American race riot in which more whites were killed than blacks, and it remains one of the few such riots in the nation’s history (even in most of the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s, more blacks died than whites). At courts martial over the next nine months, 110 black soldiers were found guilty of murder, mutiny, and other major wartime offenses. Nineteen were hanged, most of them in secret to avoid rancorous publicity. Sixty-three others were given life sentences. None of the participants in the East St. Louis riot, white or black, would end up being punished with anything approaching that severity.52

  Nationally, outrage at the East St. Louis riot did much to bring blacks and whites into the fold of civil rights organizations, particularly the NAACP. Du Bois and Gruening’s inflamed articles about East St. Louis boosted the circulation of the Crisis by many thousands, and by the end of the year, for the first time, it exceeded fifty thousand. Membership in the NAACP soared from about ninety-two hundred in 1917 to almost forty-four thousand in 1918. And for the first time, several prominent black secret and fraternal organizations, which represented a socially conservative black elite, made contributions to the NAACP. The national Urban League grew as well, and it opened a St. Louis branch in direct response to the riot. The riot also intensified and broadened the appeal of the antilynching campaign spearheaded by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the NAACP, and played into the hands of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic black leader who used the riot as a recruiting tool for his Back to Africa movement. In a speech in New York on July 8, the eloquent Jamaican-born Garvey thundered, “For three hundred years the Negroes of America have given their life blood to make the Republic the first among the nations of the world, and all along this time there has never been even one year of justice but on the contrary a continuous round of oppression. At one time it was slavery, at another time lynching and burning, and up to date it is wholesale butchering. This is a crime against the laws of humanity; it is a crime against the laws of the nation; it is a crime against nature, and a crime against the God of all mankind.” His audience leapt to its feet in cheers and applause.53

  The Silent Parade and the presidential rebuff in Washington did not end Madam C. J. Walker’s commitment to the fight for black rights and justice. Until her death in 1919, she contributed thousands of dollars to antilynching campaigns and made speeches urging the federal government to take action against the murd
er of blacks. At a national meeting of her sales agents in Philadelphia, the forty-nine-year-old black millionaire declared, “We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.”54

  CHAPTER 12

  Judgment Days

  On October 1, 1917, Circuit Court of Illinois judge George A. Crow, a crony of the East St. Louis political machine, opened the trial of the thirteen black men charged with the murder of Detective Sergeant Coppedge. The courtroom in the county seat of Belleville was packed to overflowing. About half of the spectators were black. Since this was the first case actually to come to trial—some other cases had been settled through plea bargaining—many of them shared the fear of the St. Louis Argus, the black weekly, that the prosecutors intended to use the trial to prove that the riot had been caused by blacks, giving them a pretext for dropping or greatly reducing charges against more than one hundred whites.1

  The man charged as the leader of the killers, Dr. Leroy N. Bundy, was not among the defendants. The dentist and civil rights leader had left East St. Louis during the riot and finally had been tracked down in his hometown of Cleveland, where he was fighting extradition. His attorneys told the governor of Ohio he would be lynched if he returned to East St. Louis.

  Several white men testified that they had seen or heard a large group of blacks on Bond Avenue late on July 1. One said the men were armed with long guns and pistols and seemed to assemble about eleven P.M. at the ringing of a church bell. Patrolman Patrick Cullinane, who had been in the police car with Coppedge and Wodley, said the mob of blacks had fired without provocation. He could not identify anyone in the courtroom as having fired shots; neither could the other survivors of the police-car shooting.

  The key prosecution witness was a black iceman named Edward Wilson who testified that he had seen most of the defendants on the night of the shooting with guns in their hands. Wilson had been arrested several days after the riot and originally had been slated to be among those tried for the police killings, but he had agreed to testify for the prosecution. The defense contended that the iceman had actually been leading another black mob near Tenth and Bond at the time of the shootings. According to testimony at the trial, before his status had so dramatically changed, Wilson had told one of his fellow defendants that he would do anything to avoid going to jail.

  As the trial proceeded, blacks testified that each of the young defendants was somewhere else—home in bed, visiting his family, across the river in St. Louis—when it was alleged that he was in the crowd on Bond Avenue. But most of the testimony was by whites, and it was damning to the defendants. They might not individually have been seen firing at the police car, but there was considerable testimony that each was present when the policemen were killed. In a crucial statement, a white witness testified he had heard a black man in the crowd mutter that someone would die when the church bell rang.

  The judge allowed the prosecution to present evidence that there was a black conspiracy to wreak vengeance on whites, but disallowed defense attempts to show that blacks were reacting to a conspiracy of terror by whites. He cut off repeated defense attempts to get black witnesses to talk about white gunmen driving through black neighborhoods and firing into homes. The judge instructed the jury that just being in the crowd from which the policemen were shot, and not having argued against attacking whites, was sufficient to justify a murder verdict. It took the all-white, predominantly rural jury fifteen hours to deliver, on October 7, a verdict of guilty for ten of the thirteen defendants in the murder of Coppedge. They were all sentenced to a minimum of fourteen years in the state prison at Chester, Illinois.2

  As soon as the courtroom was cleared, the murder trial of two white men began. Herbert Wood and Leo Keane were charged with dragging an old black man named Scott Clark down Broadway with a rope around his neck and trying to kill him, repeatedly, by hauling the rope over a light-pole box. The man lived through the ordeal, but died of severe internal injuries later. The defendants’ fate was probably sealed when the much-admired Colonel E. P. Clayton pointed out the two men in the courtroom and said he personally had seen them leading the gang that was trying to hang Scott Clark. The final stroke came when the dead man’s widow, Iva Clark, described how she and her husband had hid from rioters in the basement of their house and finally fled when the house was set on fire. They ran to another house, but it too was set on fire, and they ran again. Rioters caught them beneath the body of a black man already hanging dead from a light pole, knocked her husband unconscious with an iron bar, draped the rope around his neck, and hauled him away as she screamed for them to stop.

  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Paul Y. Anderson took the stand and described the scene that night as “a Negro hunt,” and prosecutor Middlekauf picked up that theme in his closing statement, demanding the death penalty for Wood. “If Negro hunts are considered permissible, we will have to keep soldiers in every city in this state,” he said. The all-white jury deliberated for less than two hours and found Keane and Wood guilty. They too were sentenced to fourteen years in state prison.3

  In the most dramatic trial, three white men—John Dow, a teenager who drove an ice wagon; Charles Hanna, a young adult who drove a repair truck for a tire service; and Harry Robinson, a middle-aged shoemaker—were charged with the murder of a white hardware merchant named Charles Keyser. The defendants were accused of causing the deaths of three people, not just one. But the prosecution chose to focus on the killing of Keyser almost certainly because he was white, unlike the other two victims, a black father and his black stepson, who were treated in the context of the trial as collateral damage.

  Wide-ranging testimony painted a portrait of Dow and Hanna, in particular, as brutes on a bloodthirsty rampage. Witnesses testified that Hanna and Dow pulled blacks, including children, from streetcars and automobiles and beat and kicked and shot them. Each was overheard boasting about killing black men. Dow bragged about throwing the bodies of his victims in Cahokia Creek. Hanna threatened to kill an ambulance driver if he picked up a critically wounded black man lying in the street. And all three defendants were identified as being among the men who had smashed in the window of a pawnshop and taken three dozen revolvers and twelve boxes of ammunition. One of the guns, witnesses said, was used to kill Keyser.4 The key testimony, however, came from a black woman from St. Louis whose teenage son had been the target of the bullet that had killed Keyser. Mrs. Lena Cook, her husband, her son, and her thirteen-year-old daughter were the family that had been on a fishing trip at a lake near East St. Louis and were returning home when their streetcar was stopped on Collinsville Avenue by a mob of white men who jerked the trolley from the overhead wire. Then, she testified, pointing across the courtroom at Hanna:

  That man reached through the window and grabbed my dress and tore it partly off. He said, “Come on out you black bitch because we want to kill you!” Then that other man [she pointed at Dow] came into the car and said, “All you white people get out. We’re going to kill these niggers.”

  The white people got off. I told them that we all didn’t live in East St. Louis and hadn’t hurt anybody there. That man [Hanna] took my husband by the collar and pulled him to the back platform and threw him off and shot him. I saw that.

  That man [Dow] took my boy and started to drag him out. I took hold of him. “You’ve killed my husband,” I said. “Don’t kill my boy.” He jerked him away, beating him over the head with his revolver, and that was the last time I saw my son alive.

  She paused, lowering her head, fighting back tears, and then she wiped her eyes and glared across the hushed courtroom. She thrust out her right hand, a finger pointing straight at Charles Hanna, and said:

  Then that man came back and dragged me out of the car, and men beat me, and kicked me, and pulled my hair out. A white man got in front of me and called out, “Don’t kill the women folks.” The men started beating him, and I crawled on my hands and knees into a store.<
br />
  Well, I fell over in this doorway, and at that time some tall white fellow came running there and said, “Please don’t beat her any more.”

  “I am not going to let them kill you,” he said, “stay back there.” And so he threw his arm across the door like that and I was behind him and he says, “in the name of the Lord don’t kill the woman.” And then some way or other they got me into the ambulance, and there was another fellow lying there, a colored fellow on the side of the ambulance, and I saw he had a big handkerchief and I took it and wiped the blood out of my eyes, and when I looked down I saw my husband lying there and my boy right under me. They had their eyes open and they were dead.