Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  The riot began on Sunday, July 27, after a white man threw a rock at a black boy who was swimming close to what whites considered to be a white-only beach on Lake Michigan. The rock struck the boy on the head and he drowned. Fights between blacks and whites broke out on the beach and spread into the city. Roving white mobs attacked badly outnumbered blacks. Whites in automobiles sped through black neighborhoods, firing at people on the street and into homes. Black snipers fired back. The riot, which ranged into the Loop and across much of the city, lasted five days. A thousand black families were left homeless by the burning and destruction, and thirty-eight people—twenty-three of them black—were killed, at least officially. Black leaders charged that many more than that had died and that black bodies had been thrown into the Chicago River and its tributaries and burnt up in the hundreds of buildings that were reduced to cinders and rubble.39

  It is worth noting that, with the addition of Chicago to East St. Louis and Springfield, three of the worst race riots of the first two decades of the twentieth century took place in Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln and the first martyr of abolition, Elijah Lovejoy.

  After the Chicago riot, W. E. B. Du Bois, continuing on the course he had set after visiting a devastated city at the other end of Illinois two years before, wrote a declaration that made him a hero to generations of black radicals: “For three centuries we have suffered and cowered. No race ever gave Passive Resistance and Submission to Evil longer, more piteous trial. Today we raise the terrible weapon of Self-Defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”40

  Once again, as in 1917, the attacks on blacks in the Red Summer of 1919 led thousands of blacks and white liberals to strengthen their commitment to civil rights for African Americans. Membership in the NAACP more than doubled to ninety-one thousand between the end of 1918 and the end of 1919, boosted in part by the publication of the NAACP study Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, which stated that 2,522 blacks and 702 whites had been lynched in thirty years, many more than had been legally executed in the same period.41

  With the lynching study as added ammunition, in 1919 James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP began intense lobbying in support of the Dyer Bill, which designated lynching as a federal crime. The bill had evolved from discussions between black leaders and Republican congressman L. C. Dyer of St. Louis in the aftermath of the East St. Louis race riot. After years of stalling, in January of 1922, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed the bill by a vote of 230 to 119. The bill was subsequently reported favorably out of committee in the Senate, but it was killed by a filibuster of Southern Democrats.42

  Numerous similar bills went down to defeat in years and decades to come. Those few that passed the House died in the Senate. Finally, in 2005, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that, in effect, apologized for never passing an antilynching law, expressing “the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynchings, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States.” The resolution, which was passed by a voice vote, was cosponsored by eighty of the one hundred members of the Senate. Among the twenty nonsponsors—nineteen Republicans and one Democrat—was former Senate majority leader Trent Lott. The Mississippi Republican, who had lost his leadership position because of remarks seen as racially divisive, said of the resolution, “Where do we end all this? Are we going to apologize for not doing the right thing on Social Security?”43

  In the spring of 1921, the final major race riot of the World War I era hit Tulsa, Oklahoma. The city’s black population had grown from just under two thousand in 1910 to almost nine thousand in 1920, and blacks, who made up about 12 percent of the populace, were blamed for much of the crime in the vice-ridden oil-patch city. On May 31, riot fever was stirred up in the white population by an inflammatory, misleadingly lurid news story about a young black man’s “assault” on a white woman on a downtown elevator. Apparently, the elevator lurched, they were thrown together, and she screamed and accused him of attacking her. Police arrested the young black man. That evening, a rumor swept through the city’s black community that a lynch mob was gathering downtown near the city jail and courthouse, and some blacks headed that way to defend the prisoner. A counter-rumor spread like an oil-field fire among the city’s whites—that a gang of armed blacks was on the way downtown to break the black prisoner out of jail before the whites could lynch him. Whites broke into sporting goods and hardware stores, grabbing hundreds of rifles and guns and cases of ammunition, and began shooting and beating blacks. They invaded Tulsa’s black section, Greenwood, setting fire to homes.

  By the next morning, thirty-five blocks of the city were in flames. A small group of armed blacks fought back. By then, National Guard troops had reached Tulsa, and the guardsmen fired on the blacks with mounted machine guns. The official death toll was thirty-six, including twenty-six blacks. Once again, historians and civil rights leaders have estimated that one hundred or more blacks were actually killed, their bodies hauled by the truckload to the outskirts of town and secretly buried in mass graves, or incinerated in their homes beyond human recognition, or dumped in the Arkansas River, whose treacherous waters, according to the enduring oral tradition of Tulsa’s African Americans, “ran red” with the blood of blacks on the first day of June in the year of 1921.44

  CHAPTER 13

  The Deal with the Devil

  East St. Louis, with its mile upon mile of utterly meaningless streets and mean houses, with something extraordinarily brutal and even threatening in the air, is the most perfect example, at least in America, of what happens under absentee ownership.

  —Sherwood Anderson

  During and immediately after the First World War, as hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks moved to the North in search of decent jobs and better lives, more than two dozen American cities and towns exploded in riot. The first and officially the deadliest of these race riots took place in East St. Louis. Why?

  One way that East St. Louis differed from many Northern cities, it could be argued, was that it and the rest of southern Illinois were distinctly Southern in racial attitudes, more akin to the former slave states of Kentucky and Missouri on its riverine borders than to northern Illinois. The blacks who came to East St. Louis from the South by the thousands in 1915, 1916, and the first half of 1917 had been led to expect better treatment in the North. As the congressional committee that investigated the East St. Louis riot observed, “They swarmed into the railroad station on every train, to be met by their friends who formed reception committees and welcomed them to the financial, political and social liberty which they thought Illinois guaranteed.” But East St. Louisans were not ready to grant those liberties, and resented the black newcomers for acting as if men and women with black skin were entitled to be treated as equals.

  According to one East St. Louis business executive, “Being as close to the Mason Dixon line as we are, we naturally resent it when a Negro assumes the attitude of being able to do anything that he chooses… for instance getting on a streetcar and crowding up as close to a white woman as he can, and assuming that attitude.” Another executive said that East St. Louis whites “didn’t represent the Northern sentiment,” which seems an understatement. The Ku Klux Klan was active in southern Illinois in 1917, even marching in robes through the streets of East St. Louis as hearings and trials were being held in the aftermath of the riot.

  The relatively small size of the city may also have been a factor. The first major race riots of the twentieth century took place in towns and small cities in Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana, not in major metropolises like Chicago or Washington, D.C. In smaller cities and towns, blacks tended to live in the oldest sections, which almost always meant near downtown. The black ghetto
inevitably would not be all that far from city hall and the central business district. In Chicago, most whites had little daily contact with the Black Belt on the city’s South Side. In a small city like East St. Louis, much of the commercial, financial, governmental, and even social life of the city was conducted in the stores, theaters, meeting halls, and private and public office buildings of downtown. A large percentage of the population went downtown on a regular basis, where they inevitably saw large numbers of blacks and, in many cases, reacted negatively. In the congressional hearings, one white witness who worked downtown testified that on main downtown streets like Collinsville Avenue and Broadway, blacks often outnumbered whites, and another man said of blacks, “The streets were full of them.”1

  Also, the notion that there was a relatively large black population in East St. Louis was more than an illusion, at least in comparison to larger Northern cities. The black population of Chicago, the Promised Land to so many Southern blacks in the period, had reached 110,000 by 1920, the year after that city’s riot, but blacks still made up only about 4 percent of the total population. At the time of the East St. Louis riot, blacks represented about 15 percent of the total population of the city. That may not seem like such a large percentage to contemporary readers, but the Great Migration had just begun in 1917 and at least one East St. Louis business executive, Raymond Rucker of the Aluminum Ore Company, said that the black population was “sufficient here to impress upon us that we have a native colored population, one which is a problem to deal with.” The impression that downtown was swarming with blacks also may have been reinforced by the fact that East St. Louis was the northern and/or western terminus for several large railroads—a major regional transfer point—so at least some of the blacks downtown were waiting for trains to carry them to other cities to the north and west.2

  Over the long term, probably the most important factor in laying groundwork for the riot was pervasive corruption. Few if any other American industrial cities, no matter how corrupt they may have been—and Chicago, Houston, and Tulsa, among others, were indisputably corrupt—had been so thoroughly turned over to its criminals and thugs as East St. Louis. The city’s relatively small size and absentee ownership made it easier for it to be dominated by malign elements. The great majority of the residents were poor—in 1918, the U.S. Census Bureau named East St. Louis the second-poorest city in the country—with little political clout except in the weeks before municipal elections. Criminals and their hirelings ruled, with the help of corrupt police and politicians and judges.3

  By the time of the riot, East St. Louis for several decades had been a city where street crime and sudden violence had become such an expected part of daily life that many ordinary citizens carried guns to town. “We had such corruption,” newspaper publisher James Kirk remarked to the congressional investigating committee, “such maladministration, such robbery of the city treasury, such wholesale plundering, such crimes and vice and theft and utter disregard of the public interest that you would think the community would rise up in rebellion and go down to City Hall… and demand a change.” In a sense, of course, much of the community did rise up on July 2, 1917, but the main targets were not in city hall.4

  Numerous witnesses at the congressional riot hearings blamed black crime for inflaming whites in 1917. “One thing that helped lead up to the riot,” said W. A. Miller, director of the downtown YMCA, “was a lawless element of colored fellows—may not be more than two or three—who were practicing robbing down in this Valley section. Every night there would be two or three robberies down there, and occasionally some fellow who refused to be robbed would be injured, maybe shot in the arm or leg, and … the police were never getting them.” Even when these black holdup men were arrested, he said, they were soon out on bail and the case was “done away with” in the corrupt police courts.

  “It is my opinion,” Miller said, “that the race riot came as a result of the people who indulged in it coming to feel that there was no law in East St. Louis.”5

  The contribution of blacks to that lawless atmosphere was exaggerated, as even Miller suggested by observing that perhaps “no more than two or three” black robbers were operating in the Valley. A military board of inquiry looking into the performance of the National Guard during the July riot noted after several days of hearings that there was “no evidence tending to show that the lawless element among negroes is large or abnormal.” Instead, the board said, “evidence tends to show that the negro citizens of the community and those who have come into East St. Louis within the last six to eight months are law abiding working people.” As for assaults on white women—part of the festival of rumors that stoked the small city’s racial fires in the first half of 1917—the military board of inquiry specifically asked East St. Louis mayor Fred Mollman if blacks, in the months leading up to the riot, were guilty of “any sex outrages.”

  “No,” he replied.

  “No complaints or prosecutions that white women were outraged by colored men?” he was asked.

  “No, sir.”6

  What is almost certainly true is that crime was on the rise in the war-boom years of 1916 and 1917 among both blacks and whites. Blacks were blamed, in part because of the play given to blacks attacking whites in the East St. Louis Daily Journal and some other area newspapers. But in East St. Louis much of the crime in the streets was committed by whites. One particularly noxious plague zone surrounded the Commercial Hotel—a haunt of hoodlums and holdup men, pimps and whores, pickpockets and gamblers—less than two blocks from the main police station. The hotel’s saloon and another one adjacent to it at Third and Missouri had been closed for several months by Mayor Fred Mollman in the winter and early spring. But Mollman had allowed the saloons to reopen after his landslide electoral victory in April, “adding to the already terrible lawless conditions of this section,” said W. A. Miller, whose YMCA sat right across the street. At least one carload of gunmen who shot up black neighborhoods on July 1 seems to have come from the Commercial Hotel, so in that sense it had a direct causative connection to the riot.

  In a letter to Mayor Mollman on May 25, three days before the first riot, Miller complained about the “daily practice of robbing and killing” around the hotel, and warned that because of “the lawless element harbored by saloons licensed by the city to operate in a section of vice and crime not equaled in any city in the West, I predict that more blood of good citizens will be spilled as a price of these saloon licenses.”7

  The reference to saloon licenses was not just a casual one. Because of cozy deals between businessmen and politicians, East St. Louis was starving for funds and as a result, ironically, crime, vice, and drunkenness had become integral to the city’s fiscal survival. The single largest source of income to the city were saloon licenses.

  That seems an astonishing statement, but in 1916 saloon licenses brought $175,000 into the coffers of East St. Louis, 43 percent of the city’s $400,000 income for the year. By comparison, in roughly the same period, saloon licenses provided about 4.5 percent of the annual budget of St. Louis. In 1917, East St. Louis desperately tried to balance the city’s books, which were soaked in red ink, by raising the price of a saloon license from $500 to $750 a year. Closing down all the city’s noxious saloons simply did not make fiscal sense to the political machine that ran East St. Louis.8

  In addition, fines for illegal and unlicensed saloons (and brothels and gambling joints) were crucial to the city. The money went into the public coffers after the unsalaried justices of the peace took their cuts. Unlicensed “blind tigers” in the Valley—black and white—were fined repeatedly, even after they had paid the routine bribes that police counted on to supplement their low salaries of $70 to $80 a month. The dives were never shut down for very long. The city needed them to reopen so it could fine them again. And East St. Louis also needed the fines and bribes paid by the hundreds of prostitutes, black and white, who worked the streets in twelve-hour shifts. One prostitute who worked for s
everal decades and became known as the “Mother of the Valley” was arrested more than one hundred times, and she alone paid out several thousand dollars in fines and court costs.9

  With the hundreds of prostitutes came dozens if not hundreds of pimps, men with strong arms and bad tempers, adding to the potential for violence. And the saloons and gambling joints and whorehouses lining the streets, particularly in the Valley and along the so-called Whiskey Chute across St. Clair Avenue from the stockyards, depended upon cadres of hoodlums and street toughs to maintain a semblance of order. In the years leading up to the riot, an untold number of criminals, white and black, arrived in East St. Louis—some of them from as far away as Chicago and New York—drawn by the small midwestern industrial and transportation center’s reputation as a wide-open town with corrupt police and a notably forgiving judiciary. Most of these petty criminals were armed—guns could be bought for as little as fifty cents in downtown pawnshops—and the laws against carrying pistols were generally ignored. Some of the men were prone to acts of great brutality, like the notorious 1916 beheading of a three-year-old boy whose father would not stop complaining to police about criminal activity in his neighborhood.

  East St. Louis’s deal with the devil meant that when July of 1917 rolled around, the city was full of thugs and saloon brawlers, many of them armed, all of them prone to violence, with little regard for the social compact. Witness after witness at trials and hearings after the riot testified that many of the rioters came from the dozens of low dives jammed together side by side throughout the main part of the city, barrelhouses where the back bar might be a plank laid out over empty whiskey barrels, where whiskey was sold for a nickel a shot, with gambling in the back room and prostitutes upstairs.

  East St. Louis had been prepared for the murderous onslaught of July 2, 1917, by decades of lawlessness, brutality, greed, selfish ambition, and racial animosity, much of it aroused by the cynical men who owned and controlled the city, although they did not necessarily live in it—or pay taxes to it. Some corporate executives tried to shift the blame to the unions, particularly members of the marginalized aluminum workers union. But Paul Anderson, among others, said he hadn’t seen any men he associated with organized labor in the riot. Instead, “The men who seemed to take the most active part,” Anderson said, “were the type that you would call saloon loungers; the kind of men who inhabit wine rooms and places of that character.” Congressman John E. Raker, after hearing two weeks of searingly detailed testimony, described the men who led the rioting as “barrelhouse loafers.”10