Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  But what is surprising is the number of ordinary working people, not all of them poor, some of them middle-aged, who joined the riot and even helped lead it: a chauffeur, a railroad switchman, a messenger boy, an icewagon driver, a salesman of photo supplies, a security guard. Why did these seemingly ordinary people decide to join in the murder of black men, women, and children and the burning of more than a dozen square blocks of their hometown? And why did thousands of their fellow citizens let them do it, and in many cases cheer them on as they committed acts of shocking brutality against men, women, and children?

  Race riots, including the one in East St. Louis, have been studied in great detail by sociologists, psychologists, and historians. It seems clear that what happened that hot July day in 1917 on the east bank of the Mississippi is what usually happens in a riot once it gets started. Mob psychology takes control and people do or acquiesce to horrible things most of them ordinarily would find repellent.

  In an “emergent norm” event like the East St. Louis riot, leaders rise from a crowd riding a wave of rumor, fear, prejudice, hatred, and anger, and establish a new and more radical norm of behavior. The crowd becomes a mob and a mob has its own standards. The rioters become possessed by what lawyer-scholar Donald L. Horowitz has called a “lucid madness,” not so much going out of control as shifting into a new mode of rationality in which killing members of another race becomes the logical and even moral thing to do. Dissenters are cowed into silence by assertive leaders as the mass moves toward a unanimity of rageful action.11

  According to Horowitz, professor of political science and law at Duke University, racial, ethnic, and religious riots are often particularly brutal. Horowitz has studied ethnic and religious violence all over the world, genocidal tribal warfare in Africa and religious slaughter in Asia as well as American race riots like the one in East St. Louis. He observes, “Although atrocities and mutilations are occasionally present in other forms of violence, they are pervasive in the deadly ethnic riot.”12

  In most riots, the violence rises in an escalating rhythm, with leaders periodically giving the mob a jolt of energy by taking the action to a new and momentarily shocking level—killing the first person, hanging the first person, attacking women or children for the first time. Each step upward creates a new and even more murderous norm. The rules of civilized behavior no longer apply as the mob is caught up in the fury of the increasingly sadistic rising action.

  British historian Malcolm McLaughlin, who has studied and written about the East St. Louis riot extensively, argues that the leaders who emerged from the crowd in East St. Louis were often people with a particular axe to grind—for example, white pimps and prostitutes and other petty criminals trying to exact revenge on the black competition and drive it out of town. These people, McLaughlin says, “physically orchestrated the violence, shaping and reshaping norms of behaviour in the riot, driving it forward … With a bold leading figure or subgroup acting consistently and with vigour, the crowd on July 2 came to accept greater and greater acts of violence … Simply put, whites in East St. Louis got ‘caught up in the mood’ of the riot.”13

  Significantly, he notes, reporter Roy Albertson remarked that, in the early stages of the riot, the rioters “were just running around … promiscuously from one end of the street to the other.” After a while, Albertson said, “they would get tired of beating up negroes there and they would look for some other new game … As the day wore on, the rioting grew more serious.”14

  McLaughlin writes:

  Over the day, attacks became increasingly focused on killing—not simply beating—and involved increasingly systematic searches for African Americans… stopping streetcars, searching them for black passengers, dragging out those they found, and beating them with brickbats … Then, soon after 1 o’clock, two wagon drivers, Charles Hanna and John Dow, who were leading the assaults, dragged Edward Cook and his foster son from a streetcar and shot and killed them. From that point a new murderous intent became established … [A]n almost casual attitude developed towards murder once the behavioural boundary had been crossed; in the early afternoon, rioters “calmly” shot and killed prone victims. And while these core rioters broke increasingly brutal ground, the crowd followed behind them, not participating but cheering and “hissing” at dissenters to maintain unanimity.15

  Later in the afternoon, white police officers reportedly suggested the rioters loot a pawnshop for weapons, and word spread that the police were on the side of the rioters, which helped make them feel their actions were more legitimate. After that, rioters with guns torched buildings in the black neighborhood along Third Street and shot blacks as they ran from them. Rioters were not just attacking passing blacks, as they had in the morning. They were looking for blacks to kill.

  About three forty-five, a national guardsman asked a rioter to stop beating a black man, saying he had “done enough.” The rioter immediately shot the black man through the head.

  “Murder was now the established norm,” observes McLaughlin. He goes on:

  By early evening, the brutal element was holding sway, controlling the riot at the “storm center” of Fourth and Broadway. It was after six o’clock, at the height of the violence, that the news reporter Paul Anderson, for example, saw a rioter sit on a black man and shoot not one but “several shots” into that man’s head; one victim was shot in the face and then hanged; another was hanged and then shot twice in the head. There seems also to have been a degree of sadistic delight, which shocked watching reporters; a man being hanged was teased with “good natured jabs in the ribs” as a noose was placed around his neck …

  [T]he worst of the violence was carried out by a leadership core. Even when certain crowd members participated in a limited way, they still looked to the mob leadership to approve and orchestrate killings. When some crowd members beat two fleeing black men they did not kill them, but passed them on to more active rioters, shouting “hang them” and “swing ’em up.” On another occasion, the crowd set two black men against a wall for three armed whites to shoot and kill…

  Undoubtedly, that assembled crowd bears responsibility for eventually supporting indiscriminate murder. However, without prodigiously violent individuals at the core of the mob, willing to break new violent ground, it seems far from certain that the riot would have ended in bloody tumult at Fourth and Broadway.16

  Studies of riots and laboratory experiments suggest that being part of a mob, paradoxically, gives a rioter both anonymity and an identity. He embraces a collective vision—establishing that he is a right-thinking member of the group committing the violent acts—and at the same time he avoids personal responsibility by being a faceless member of the crowd. In general, the larger the lynch mob, the more terrible the atrocities it commits. “deindividualization” in a mob attack does not apply only to the rioters. The victims are deprived of their individuality, their humanness, and thus become more easily attacked.17

  For a rioter, being a member of a racist mob also makes it clear, to others as well as to himself, that he is not a member of the despised group. Jeremy Krikler, a British historian from South Africa, compares the East St. Louis riot to a racial massacre in 1922 in the streets of the Rand, Johannesburg’s gold-mining district, during a long and bitter strike by miners. Mine owners had crushed the white miners’ union by refusing to negotiate and by bringing in black strikebreakers. The government sided with the owners. Union leaders were arrested. Police and troops were mobilized to protect the strikebreakers and keep the mines open. Strikers were killed in street battles. And after two months of painful losses, amid false rumors of black uprisings, the defeated miners and other whites rose up and attacked black neighborhoods, killing as many as forty people, few of them having any direct involvement with the strike. The government had to call in the air force to quell the violence.

  One reason for the degree of brutality in South Africa, Krikler speculates, is that the white miners were desperate to prove their own whiteness i
n a circumstance in which all of the powerful forces in their community were insisting that they were no better than the blacks—indeed, perhaps not as good. He sees a similar dynamic motivating the rioters in East St. Louis, a fear among poor whites of plunging lower than the lowest stratum of society and a need to identify with those higher up. He calls the massacre in East St. Louis “a collusion” of white assailants with police and National Guard:

  Given that not long before this, white para-military or military personnel had been used to suppress white workers’ militancy in East St. Louis, is it not possible that the carnival of slaughter in 1917 was linked subconsciously to an attempt to restore that community of whites which had earlier been shattered by class conflict? What could do this better than working with the forces of law and order earlier used against strikers? Rumours of this time in East St. Louis—that formations (even “armies”) of blacks were about to slaughter whites—are not very different from the kinds of rumour that plagued white working-class communities in 1922 on the Rand and, significantly, they were the kinds of rumours that effaced all distinctions among whites since they gestured at a common threat to all classes.18

  The Rand riot was fed by what was known as the “Black Peril,” the enduring and periodically intensified fear that the black majority would swoop down upon the white invaders, killing, raping, and pillaging. White fear, racial paranoia, guilt, and rage coalesced to deadly effect. Similarly, the East St. Louis riot could be seen as resulting from the fear of a black uprising, spurred on by reports that the blacks were preparing to massacre whites on July 4 and that Dr. Leroy Bundy was training an armed cadre of blacks.

  Those may have been false rumors, but there is no question that blacks in East St. Louis took a radical step on the first day of July in 1917. They armed themselves and gathered in the streets for self-defense, responding to months of attacks that culminated on July 1 in whites driving through black neighborhoods firing guns. To many whites, the armed blacks must have personified an American version of the Black Peril.

  In other riots before East St. Louis, notably in Atlanta, blacks had used guns to defend their neighborhoods, but only after a riot was well under way, after homes had been burned down and blacks had been killed. What happened in East St. Louis was new, and that may well go a long way toward explaining why East St. Louis was the first city of the World War I period to erupt into race riot. For the first time, dozens if not hundreds of armed blacks assembled before the riot started. They were prepared to fight, to shoot and kill if necessary, in defense of their neighborhoods and their lives.

  The fear of blacks organizing to repel white attacks with guns explains why whites were so alarmed at reports of the black Odd Fellows marching with weapons near Bundy’s house earlier in the year; reports of a church bell ringing to signal blacks to arm themselves and get ready to fight; reports of blacks firing back at white gunmen riding through their neighborhoods late on the night of July 1. Those acts implied planning, preparations for a battle, for what de Tocqueville almost a century earlier had described as “the nightmare constantly haunting the American imagination”—that blacks would make war on the race that had enslaved them. The Black Peril in America.19

  The attack on the police, which seems to have been a tragic mistake, gave whites a further reason for racial fear and anger. Not only were the blacks armed and organized, not only had they fired back at men who had driven through their neighborhoods shooting guns, but they had attacked the guardians of the white power structure. Two of the first race riots of the twentieth century were triggered by the killing of black policemen in small midwestern cities: in 1903 in Evansville, Indiana, and in 1904 in Springfield, Ohio. In East St. Louis, when a police car was attacked and two white policemen were fatally shot, it was as if all the worst rumors and racial fears were confirmed. The blacks were finally rising up and killing whites, and they needed to be stopped.

  As far as many black leaders were concerned, the central issue in the trials of Leroy Bundy and the other black men for killing the two policemen was not murder or inciting to riot but black self-defense. In their eyes, the killing of the two policemen was, at worst, an understandable if regrettable accident whose root cause was the months-long reign of terror against African Americans. In both trials for the murder of the policemen, lawyers for the defense tried repeatedly—if futilely—to introduce evidence that the armed black men had assembled on the night of July 1 to defend themselves from nightriders firing into their homes. As W. E. B. Du Bois said in explaining the NAACP’s initial decision to defend Bundy, “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.” The questions of self-defense and of responding with violence to white attacks and white oppression would continue to haunt the civil rights movement for decades to come.20

  Finally, it cannot be forgotten that the riot in East St. Louis came at one of the most violent periods in history, as the United States and the world were struggling to absorb all the staggering changes—political, social, cultural, scientific, and technological—that came with the twentieth century. Empires were shattering, class structures were warping, traditional belief systems were evaporating, social compacts were being ripped up, and alliances were being torn apart. Europe was in the midst of a great war in which millions died in Sisyphean trench warfare, blown to bits by long-range shells from unseen artillery guns or choked to death from poison gas, a weapon so cruel it was banned in the war’s aftermath.

  The riot came at the midpoint of a notably bloody year in a notably bloody decade, a year whose pivotal events would haunt the world for the rest of the century and beyond. As blacks were being slaughtered in East St. Louis, American soldiers began dying in France. In Russia, the violent period that came to be known as the July Days commenced in the embattled streets of the capital, days of slaughter that led four months later to the Bolshevik Revolution. To the south of Russia, Turks continued the ethnic cleansing that, by the end of the year, would leave 1.5 million Armenians dead. And Germany introduced mustard gas to the battlefield—a weapon of appalling cynicism and cruelty, designed not to kill but to maim and thus add to the cruel burden of the enemy. Meanwhile, the British army marched into Jerusalem to fight the Turks in the name of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Thousands died, as many thousands more would die in years to come.

  In America in 1917, labor disputes turned violent across the nation, from the shipyards of Brooklyn to the coal mines of southern Illinois, the lead mines of southeastern Missouri, and the steelyards of San Francisco, where marines were sent in to protect plants from twenty thousand striking ironworkers. By the end of the year, there had been forty-two hundred strikes nationwide, far more than in any previous year. Nightriders lynched blacks across the South, and throughout America dissenters from the war fever that seized the nation were brutally beaten, hanged, shot, and burned with hot tar. In the spring of 1917, as he prepared to bring the nation into what he would describe to Congress quite accurately as “the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” President Woodrow Wilson said despairingly, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”21

  The World War I years were a time of great intolerance brutally expressed, of war and revolution and global chaos, the first movement of a dissonant century of unparalleled freedom and democracy and unparalleled tyranny and mass murder. As Hannah Arendt so eloquently has written, the “magnitude of the violence let loose in the First World War might have been enough to cause revolution in its aftermath even without any revolutionary tradition and even if no revolution had ever occurred before.” It was a period whose defining notions came from nineteenth-century thinkers like Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche, their theories and musings often perverted by vengeful demagogues. It was a period dominated by the new religions of class struggle, historical inevitability, survival of the fittes
t, racial purity, and the deep desires of the subconscious, a world many saw as purged of moral absolutes, where nothing was forbidden and everything was permitted. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” a great poet wrote despairingly in 1919. The East St. Louis race riot and those that followed it were, in one sense, yet another bloody episode in the continuing American tragedy whose precipitating event was slavery. In another sense, they were manifestations of the agony of the emerging twentieth century, the most violent century of them all.22

  EPILOGUE

  The East St. Louis Blues

  Bluesman Henry Townsend, who worked juke joints with Robert Johnson during the Depression and was still performing in his nineties, ran away from home as a boy in 1919 and rode an Illinois Central freight train 125 miles north from the river town of Cairo, Illinois. When he climbed down in the freight yards of East St. Louis, he discovered the riot was still “a fresh thing, it hadn’t cooled off.”

  “Being a nine-year-old kid, I still knew what was happening,” he recalled eighty years later. “I had to know because I’m still here … East St. Louis was a major migration area for people from the South. And everybody out of the South had a .45 or a .38 or something. And that was underestimated among the whites that got this thing kicked off.”1