Mayor Mollman, whom Bundy had said was not “the real mayor” but a figurehead for Tarlton and Canavan, called Bundy’s charges “a malicious lie.” Mollman also said, probably accurately, that the Republican Bundy was trying to influence the Republican attorney general to drop or lessen the murder charge against him. If so, Bundy failed, and at the same time he alienated his most powerful supporters.
In the aftermath of the conviction in early October of ten black men for the murder of Coppedge, men whose defense had been supported in part by the St. Louis branch of the NAACP, the association’s national office arranged for prominent lawyers, white and black, to work in Bundy’s defense, including Charles Nagel, former secretary of commerce and labor in the Taft administration. Bundy quickly became a cause célèbre among blacks and white liberals. One black newspaper called his case “not just the trial of an individual” but “the trial of the Race.” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Here we understood was a successful professional man, a leader of his local group in East St. Louis, who, when riot was threatened, advised the colored people to arm themselves and … because of this he was arrested, thrown into jail and accused of murder and inciting to riot. This seemed to us an ideal case. We were determined to leave no stone unturned to secure vindication for Dr. Bundy and, with this, the great and sacred right of self-defense for American Negroes in the face of the mob.”24
But after Bundy confessed that he had been the spigot through which thousands of dollars in election bribes had flowed to black voters, the “ideal case” seemed less so to the NAACP. Du Bois wrote:
It was an outrageous action and it put his attorneys and especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a most difficult position … We were making a hero of Bundy. We were holding him up as a brave and persecuted man, who in the midst of crime and lawlessness, had told the people to arm in self defense. In the midst of all this Mr. Bundy comes out and confesses that he is hand and glove with the men and is part of the system which made East St. Louis a city of corruption and made it possible for such a horrible riot to go on without interference by the authorities.
In April of 1918, with the matter still up in the air, the St. Louis branch of the NAACP reported that Bundy was out on bond and wanted to go on a lecture tour and raise $50,000 for himself in addition to the money the NAACP was supplying. Bundy, the branch reported, was “intolerant of the financial plan of this branch, which was devised to forestall money scandals.” Bundy also refused to go back to work and, the St. Louis branch charged, wanted the NAACP to support him and his wife and pay $2,000 in back bills. The branch recommended dropping support of Bundy. Three months later, in an angry meeting in New York with the directors of the NAACP, Bundy refused to agree to any financial accounting of the money he was receiving from the NAACP, or from any other source. Afterward, the NAACP announced it was “no longer connected in any way with the further defense of Dr. Leroy N. Bundy.” The Chicago Defender and other black papers were sharply critical of the NAACP for deserting Bundy, and the Cleveland Gazette advised its readers to resign from the “white-man controlled” organization.25
Bundy, who had continued to raise money on his own and was represented by three white lawyers and four black ones, finally went on trial for the murder of Coppedge and inciting to riot in March of 1919. The venue had been shifted to the rural town of Waterloo, Illinois, twenty miles from East St. Louis, on arguments by the defense that the jury pool in East St. Louis had been irrevocably polluted by numerous front-page stories that had described Bundy as the leader of the men who shot detectives Coppedge and Wodley.26
At the trial, which attracted national attention, a number of white witnesses testified that they had seen a crowd of blacks, some of them armed, gathering near Bundy’s house and the garage and gasoline station that adjoined it on the evening of July 1. And several white men said that, in the months before the July riot, guns had been stored in Bundy’s house and garage, and Bundy’s yard, porch, and living room became the place for blacks to hang out and argue about race and politics. Most of the witnesses admitted on cross-examination that they had not seen Bundy himself in the crowd near his house, at Seventeenth and Bond, nor anywhere else in East St. Louis on the night the policemen were shot. They had seen a red touring car driving around with armed black men in it, and Bundy owned a red touring car, a Hupmobile.
One witness who said he had seen Bundy near the scene of the shooting that night was Gus Masserang, the hoodlum and jitney driver who, according to a witness, drove a car that ended up parked in front of the Commercial Hotel riddled with holes on July 2. Masserang, it was established, had been treated at a hospital for superficial shotgun wounds early the morning of July 2. The defense fought its way through strenuous prosecution objections to suggest for the record that Masserang had been wounded while driving men firing guns through black neighborhoods and that he had made a deal to avoid prosecution and was finally holding up his end of it. It was even suggested that the men firing from Masserang’s car were policemen, which would certainly help to explain why blacks would shoot at the police car holding Wodley and Coppedge.27
Bundy’s legal septet shredded Masserang’s testimony and put on a detailed defense that attacked alleged sightings of Bundy and of his expensive red car in East St. Louis on the night of the shootings. Witnesses testified that neither Bundy’s red Hupmobile nor Bundy himself was anywhere near Tenth and Bond when the shootings occurred.28 But Edward Wilson, the black iceman whose testimony had been crucial to the ten convictions in the first trial for the murder of Coppedge, appeared again and said Bundy had been in the mob that had shot the policemen. In rebuttal, two defense witnesses testified that Wilson had told them that he had been beaten by police while in jail until he agreed to testify against Bundy and the other defendants. They said Wilson had confided to them that Bundy had not been in the mob. Still, the all-white jury found Bundy guilty, and sentenced him to life in prison. His lawyers appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, which eventually overturned the conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had not proven its case. Wilson’s key testimony was completely discredited by the court. Bundy was freed after having served about a year in the state prison at Menard, where he worked as the prison dentist.29
Bundy moved back to Cleveland and got a law degree from Western Reserve. For a time, he headed up the large Cleveland chapter of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. The flamboyant black nationalist had gone to Bundy’s support after the NAACP dropped him and, in a so-called court ceremony held in Harlem, Garvey anointed him “Sir Leroy Bundy.” The two headstrong men split in an argument over finances and Bundy entered local politics. He served as a city councilman from 1929 to 1937. In the pivotal year of 1936, with black allegiance shifting from the Republican to the Democratic Party in national politics, he helped lead the partly successful fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to block the seating of delegations from Southern states that excluded blacks.30
In 1918, as the Great War ground into its final grueling year—with tens of thousands of American doughboys shipping out for Europe every week—the Great Migration of African Americans from South to North continued, although few came to East St. Louis. Indeed, thousands of blacks who fled the city in July of 1917 never returned, and by the census of 1920 the black population of East St. Louis was just under seventy-five hundred—roughly the same as it had been in 1914, before the migration had begun. An uneasy racial peace, if not harmony, prevailed in the slowly rebuilding river city, perhaps in some part because violence-prone residents of the area had a new outlet for their prejudices—jingoism.31
In early April of 1918, in Collinsville, Illinois, a small town about ten miles east of East St. Louis, a German-born Socialist miner named Robert Prager made a speech critical of Woodrow Wilson and American participation in the Great War. He was accused of “disloyalty,” assaulted, rescued by police, dragged from police protection by a mob of three hundred men,
paraded through town wrapped in an American flag, and hanged from a tree. According to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the lynching was “the first killing for disloyalty to the United States.” Several weeks earlier, four men, including a Catholic priest of Polish descent, had been tarred and feathered in a nearby mining town as part of a widespread campaign, as the Globe-Democrat put it, “to drive disloyal persons from southern Illinois.” Similar attacks were becoming increasingly common in towns and cities across the country.32
On July 26, not long after a jury had acquitted the men who had lynched Robert Prager, President Woodrow Wilson finally issued a statement condemning lynching and “the mob spirit which [has] frequently shown its head among us, not in any single region, but in many and widely separated parts of the country.”
Although the carefully worded statement contained no specific references to lynching of blacks, the New York Times seemed to read Wilson’s mind in reporting that the president was moved to condemn lynching not only by “mob action against those suspected of being enemy aliens or enemy sympathizers” but by “lynchings of negroes in the South.” The paper explained, “It is known that the lynchings of negroes, as well as attacks upon those suspected of being enemies or enemy sympathizers, have been used by the German propaganda throughout Central and South America as well as in Europe, to contend that the stand of the United States as a champion of democracy is a sham. Deeply concerned by the situation, the president decided to address his fellow countrymen, and to declare that ‘every mob contributes to German lies about the United States.’” The NAACP printed and distributed fifty thousand copies of the president’s address, although W. E. B. Du Bois wondered rhetorically why it had taken the death of a white man to inspire the president finally to speak up when so many hundreds of blacks had been lynched over the years.33
Ironically, on the very day that the president condemned lynching and mob violence, a race riot broke out in Philadelphia, which had seen its share of them over the decades. Indeed, the previous year, a brutal race riot with several deaths had struck Chester, Pennsylvania, just southeast of the city. In the war years, thousands of blacks had crowded into the southern part of Philadelphia, lured by jobs in a new shipbuilding complex. The immigrants pushed the boundaries of established black neighborhoods. Beginning in late June, blacks were attacked in the streets by their white neighbors. On the last Friday in July, after a black woman—a city probation officer—had moved into a house she had recently bought in a white neighborhood, a white mob gathered on the street, chanting and cursing and throwing stones through the windows. The terrified woman fired a warning shot from a second-story window, bringing police, who were finally able to break up the crowd.
Further attacks on African Americans on Saturday, in the main ignored by police, led to pitched battles in the streets between blacks and whites armed with guns, clubs, razors, and bricks. The riot lasted four days. A white policeman was shot and killed trying to take a pistol away from a black man who was defending himself from a white mob, and another white man was killed when a black man fired into a crowd of whites that was chasing him. The third person killed in the riot, a black man, was shot by a policeman while in custody. In the riot’s immediate aftermath, black leaders formed a Colored Protective Association and protested the prisoner’s killing and other police actions—and inactions—charging the “incompetent police force” with “hobnobbing with the mob” during and “for a long time” before the riot, ignoring “the beating up of Negroes, the stoning of their homes and the attacking of their churches.” The black leaders’ persistent complaints in the wake of the riot eventually led to a major shakeup of the Philadelphia police department.34
There were small, comparatively brief racial clashes that year in several other cities, including New York, where blacks battled whites in both Brooklyn and Harlem, but relatively few fatalities and no large-scale arson resulted, nothing approaching the horror of East St. Louis. In part, perhaps, that relatively low level of violence came because so many young men had left home for the military. By the time of the armistice in November of 1918, four million Americans were in uniform. Also, the United States was increasingly preoccupied with “disloyalty” at home. And, in the second half of 1918, the nation was stunned by the influenza epidemic, which killed half a million Americans in less than a year.
But by the spring of 1919, the influenza epidemic had run its course and millions of former soldiers, including 350,000 African Americans, were home, having been trained in warfare and the use of weapons. The blacks had served their country in wartime and were impatient for the so-called democracy their president had promised the world. As for the whites, according to James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, “Reports from overseas had come back warning that the returned Negro soldiers would be a dangerous element and a menace [who] had been engaged in killing white men, that… they had frequently been given the treatment accorded only to white men in America and, above all, that many of them had been favorably regarded by white women. One of the chief recruiting slogans of the Klan was the necessity of united action to keep these men in line.”35
There were eighty-three cases of lynching in America in 1919, nineteen more than the year before. And there were many race riots. The generally accepted figure is roughly two dozen, and the New York Times reported in October of 1919 that there had been “38 race riots and clashes in cities and other communities in various parts of the country” so far that year. The summer of 1919 was so racially violent that James Weldon Johnson named it “the Red Summer.” The reference was to the color of blood, although America was also at the peak of a “red scare,” as right-wing congressmen and federal officials found Bolsheviks under the beds and inside the skin of every militant labor leader, pacifist, and advocate of black civil rights.36
The two most notorious riots of the Red Summer were in Chicago and Washington, although the deadliest may have been in Phillips County in Arkansas’s cotton belt, where black tenant farmers who were essentially slaves to their debt tried to organize to get a fairer deal from landowners. After a rumor spread that the county’s blacks were planning a massacre of whites, a sheriff’s posse fired on a meeting of tenant farmers and in the resulting melee a white deputy sheriff was killed. White mobs went on a rampage reminiscent of the worst days of Redemption. Officially, fourteen blacks were killed, but James Weldon Johnson contended that “between two hundred and three hundred Negroes were hunted down in the fields and swamps to which they fled, and shot down like animals.” Blacks were blamed for the riot, and in subsequent trials in Arkansas seventy-nine blacks were speedily convicted of murder. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. The NAACP fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the seventy-nine men had been denied the right to a fair trial, and freed them.37
The 1919 riot in Washington, D.C., once a rare refuge of hope for blacks but now, with Woodrow Wilson in the White House, an increasingly segregated Southern city with very high black unemployment, began on a hot, muggy night in mid-July. The story is a tragically familiar one. The four daily newspapers, including the Washington Post, had been stirring up the city’s white population with repeated lurid stories about a “Negro Fiend” who was attacking white women. A few days before the riot, the NAACP sent warnings to the four papers that they were “sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines.”
The city was crowded with soldiers and sailors home from the Great War, and the mood of drunken celebration turned ugly when the rumor circulated that a man suspected of being the Negro Fiend had been arrested and then released by Washington police. The morning of the riot, the Post published a front-page article headlined MOBILIZATION FOR TONIGHT. The story reported, erroneously, that all service personnel in the city were to report to Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue at nine P.M.. for “clean-up” duty. That evening, a white mob that included many servicemen formed in a seedy saloon district off Pennsylvania Avenue and began chasing and beating black men and w
omen. Whites dragged hundreds of blacks off of streetcars and beat and shot them. More than five hundred guns were sold to whites at pawnshops, and black veterans, many of whom had brought weapons back from France, fought back. What ensued was not so much a riot as a small-scale race war. Officially, at least thirty-nine blacks and whites were killed.38
Two weeks later, Chicago exploded in riot. The black population of Chicago had virtually doubled in the war years, inevitably pushing the boundaries of the so-called Black Belt on the South Side. Racial antagonism had been intensified by the hiring of black strikebreakers to replace white stockyard and slaughterhouse workers. That summer, there were frequent attacks on blacks with little response from police. Black homes were torched, along with the offices of real estate agents who sold to blacks. Chicago black leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett cried out to city officials and the public, “I implore Chicago to set the wheels of justice in motion before it is too late, and Chicago be disgraced by some of the bloody outrages that have disgraced East St. Louis.”
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