In the years following the riot, the black migration to East St. Louis slowly resumed. Even though the black population of East St. Louis remained a minority until the 1960s, the small city on the east bank of the Mississippi—in spite of the riot, or perhaps in part because of it—became known as a regional center of black life, epitomized by the impassioned music the migrants brought up from the fields and crossroads and whitewashed country churches of the South. “The East St. Louis Blues,” essentially the lament W. C. Handy had heard on the St. Louis levee decades earlier, was recorded by Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Furry Lewis, among other historically important blues musicians. And in 1927, Duke Ellington celebrated East St. Louis’s reputation as a tough, bluesy old town with one of his greatest compositions, “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” for many years his theme song.
The riot was not forgotten, at least not among blacks. In 1932, in “East Chicago Blues,” the Sparks Brothers sang, “East St. Louis is burning down.” In the early 1940s, Harlem artist Jacob Lawrence made the East St. Louis riot integral to his “The Migration of the Negro” series with a highly stylized tempera view of a prone black man being attacked by whites with clubs and knives, now in the Museum of Modern Art. And in February of 1952, Josephine Baker spoke of the East St. Louis riot at length and with great passion when she came back to her hometown for the first time since the early 1920s. She talked and sang and danced and modeled the latest Paris fashions for a crowd of about six thousand at Kiel Auditorium in downtown St. Louis. The crowd was racially mixed—a rarity in the St. Louis area in those days.
Baker, who had lived for many years in France, where she was revered as an artist, a humanitarian, and a hero of the resistance, was on a rare tour of the United States. She had tears in her eyes as she looked out into the vast auditorium.2 “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “believe me when I say that it makes me profoundly happy, it makes my heart swell with pride to see in this beautiful audience tonight, salt and pepper. I mean by that colored and white brothers mingling.”
She recalled that she had left St. Louis many years before in great part because of the East St. Louis riot:
I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment … frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings …
So with this vision I ran and ran and ran … but that glow in the sky of burning houses, the screams, the terror, the tears of the unfortunate children that had lost their parents—this kept coming before me on the stage, in the streets, in my sleep … I was haunted until I finally understood that I was marked by God to try to fight for the freedom of those that were being tortured.
She said she had finally decided to return to America and use her position of prominence to speak out about the tragedy of racial prejudice. She said, “Americans, the eyes of the world are upon you. How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?”3
In the early and mid-1950s, another wave of blues musicians came up to East St. Louis from the South, including bandleader Ike Turner, singer Little Milton Campbell, and guitarist Albert King. Chuck Berry would drive over from St. Louis to play guitar and sing with pianist Johnnie Johnson at the Cosmopolitan Club at Seventeenth and Bond. In 1958, a teenage girl from St. Louis named Annie Bullock with an exhilarating gospel-drenched voice began singing in East St. Louis with Ike Turner. Soon, she married him and became Tina Turner. Many years later, after she had become an international singing star, she recalled that St. Louis was “a fairly sedate place” in the mid-fifties. But across the river, particularly after hours, East St. Louis was something else entirely. “East St. Louis had action, and it never seemed to stop.”4
East St. Louis black poet Eugene Redmond calls his hometown “East Boogie.” “This was the hotbed, Paradise and Mississippi,” said Redmond, gesturing at a now-vacant intersection of unpaved streets in Rush City, a section of East St. Louis between the South End and Monsanto chemical plants, whose stacks tower over the landscape from the adjoining company town of Sauget. “You could hear Ike and Tina Turner, B. B. King, Lightning Hopkins, Jimmy Reed. When I was a kid, the population of Rush City was around fifteen hundred people. Now it’s down to perhaps two hundred.”
“Paradise Street,” he said, laughing. “From time to time, Monsanto would emit a colorless, odorless gas that would send the people of Paradise Street choking to the emergency room.” There were a few remaining shotgun houses and trailers scattered among the weeds along Paradise Street. In the distance, on the opposite shore, we could see the gleaming Gateway Arch, a monument to westward migration.
Redmond, a poet and professor of English at Southern Illinois University in suburban Edwardsville, grew up in East St. Louis in the 1940s and 1950s, spending the early years of his life on Paradise Street. Like Miles Davis two decades earlier, and like thousands of other black kids growing up in these parts over the years, Redmond heard about the massacre of 1917 long before he started grade school. “There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” he said.
He was conducting a personal and historical tour of his hometown, something he frequently does for visitors, who come in increasing numbers from as far away as Europe and Japan to see the town that produced Miles Davis and Ike and Tina Turner.
Redmond has been a professor and poet-in-residence at colleges across the country, from Oberlin in Ohio to California State University at Sacramento, but he came back to East St. Louis in 1986 because of “a chronic case of homesickness.” Redmond then became poet-in-residence for the schools of East St. Louis, going into some of the toughest classrooms in the country and encouraging kids to learn about the rich history and culture of African Americans, getting them to write poems and essays and short stories. Redmond has been the mentor of several generations of writers from the area and he is the editor of a literary magazine, Drumvoices Revue, which publishes local poets and fiction writers alongside the work of nationally prominent black writers like Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. Eugene Redmond is the official poet laureate of East St. Louis, a title he takes seriously, always working on the next gala poetry reading or jazz concert or cultural celebration in his hometown. His latest project was what he called “a mini-World’s Fair” in 2008 to celebrate black culture and the large role East St. Louis has played in it. “East St. Louis ain’t dead yet,” Eugene Redmond says. “I got the scars and tattoos to prove it.”
Redmond, wearing an African black-leather hat, circular with a slanted top like a beret, and an old sweatshirt promoting the Miles Davis Arts Festival, put his battered old compact car in gear and we left Rush City and headed north, past acres of rubble-strewn vacant lots struggling to become prairie once again.
We crossed into the South End, bouncing across rails—not an old streetcar track, a freight rail line that runs right down the middle of a wide street with houses on either side. There were many vacant lots in this part of the city, south and east of the shabby downtown business district, but the houses that remained were larger than the tiny ones in Rush City.
He slowed down as he said, “This neighborhood was prosperity for the blacks in the early part of the twentieth century, and the rioters sacked it. A lot of it was never built back up.”
We drove past houses where well-known East St. Louisans had grown up: Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee; film-director brothers Warring-ton and Reginald Hudlin; Barbara Ann Teer, who founded the National Black Theater in Harlem; Miles Davis. Redmond pointed out the red shotgun house where Ike and Tina Turner lived. In the African tradition, poets are part magician, and Redmond has an almost mystical belief in the ability of East St. Louis to turn out exceptional people. He has a point. T
here is something remarkable about the number of prominent men and women who have come from its financially gutted schools, its dilapidated housing, its polluted environment, and its mean streets. East St. Louis not only turns out athletes and musicians and other people in the arts, but also people like Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin, Donald McHenry, ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, and Ellen Soeteber, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 2001 to 2005.
We crossed Bond Avenue, a main thoroughfare for aspiring blacks in the first half of the twentieth century, and, in July of 1917, the street where two white policemen were fatally shot to trigger the deadliest race riot of an era. We continued through the city to the North End and the old stockyards. The cows and pigs and sheep were all gone, and what remained had an ominous post-apocalyptic feel—bare pillars and weather-eaten smokestacks and multilevel structures that look like ruined parking garages three and four and five stories high, where pigs by the thousands once walked up ramps to slaughter. We stopped for a moment. “Listen,” says Redmond. The wind rustled through the weeds and thistles and moaned around the bare superstructures of the abandoned slaughterhouses. Redmond smiled sadly, and gently shook his head.
“I come here and meditate on East St. Louis and sometimes I can hear the squeals of the pigs that died here when I was a child.”
We headed east past the abandoned stockyards and turned onto an interstate highway. “They built the first freeway in 1964, and it ruined East St. Louis,” Redmond said. “Now the rich people could just drive right past it, right over it.” We were still well within the limits of East St. Louis, driving east through land that was mostly vacant, land that Redmond envisioned just waiting for the bulldozer or the plow. “The city is twelve square miles. See all this land?” he asked. “There is enough land to feed everybody.”5
The population of East St. Louis hit its peak of eighty-two thousand in 1950, when the city was still predominantly white. The tipping point—when blacks began to outnumber whites—came in the very early 1960s, and the departure of whites became a panicked exodus. By 1970, the total population had fallen to seventy thousand, about 70 percent black.6
The dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, who, like Josephine Baker, was at least as well known in Paris and Rome as she was in the United States, came to East St. Louis in 1964 as part of an extended visit to Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville (SIUE) campus. Dunham, who brought African tradition into modern dance, had grown up in the Chicago suburb of Joliet. She was seven years old when the riot ripped the heart out of East St. Louis, and, like Baker, she never forgot it.
When she saw the poverty and desolation of so much of East St. Louis almost five decades later, she typically became inspired to start a new project—to help save East St. Louis. She became artist in residence at SIUE. Periodically, she would leave—to choreograph a show in Rome for Marcello Mastroianni, to direct dance troupes and to perform herself in Paris and New York, Senegal and Haiti. Haiti became her second home. But she kept coming back to southern Illinois. She bought a house in East St. Louis and established a performing arts center nearby to teach dance and martial arts to young people of the city.7
Katherine Dunham
In the summer of 1964, a white policeman shot an unarmed black fifteen-year-old in Harlem, and in response a black mob looted and burned white-owned stores in Harlem and in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Race riots hit other American cities that year, and in 1965, when the six-day Watts riot in Los Angeles resulted in the death of thirty-four people, twenty-five of them black. The riots continued in the late 1960s, an era of great social change, like the 1910s. But these riots—some blacks called them “uprisings”—were different in several significant ways from those of the World War I period. Perhaps most important, although whites were often attacked and sometimes killed in the course of the riots, and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of white-owned property was destroyed, there was very little of the relentless racial stalking and slaughter that marked the riots in East St. Louis, Tulsa, and elsewhere earlier in the century. These were not racial massacres.8
In September of 1967, a race riot broke out in East St. Louis. It grew out of protest marches inspired by a visit from militant H. Rap Brown. A young black protester was shot to death when he ran from police, who were questioning him in a stockyards parking lot, and about thirty blacks marched on the East St. Louis police station. Shortly afterward, gangs began looting and burning white-owned businesses in the South End and attacking the cars of white motorists. After two days and about thirty-five arrests, the riot died down. The only fatality was the young black man shot by police.9
After the riot, Katherine Dunham intensified her work with young people in the city and in 1970 she took forty-three students from East St. Louis to Washington, where they performed African dance and karate at the White House. Over the years since then, students from the Katherine Dunham center in East St. Louis have performed across the country, and the center has worked with thousands of young people, bringing in teachers from around the world.10
In the 1970s, a black political machine took over the government of East St. Louis from the white political machine that had run the city for one hundred years. The stockyards closed in the 1960s and early 1970s and some of the major industries left the area as well, leaving nationally prominent hazardous waste sites in their wake. By the 1980s, when author Jonathan Kozol visited East St. Louis for Savage Inequalities, his excoriating and anguished examination of the raw deal poor kids were getting in America’s public schools, East St. Louis was 98 percent black, and poorer than it had ever been. In fact 75 percent of the city’s population was on some form of welfare. The Department of Housing and Urban Development described East St. Louis as “the most distressed small city in America.” Chemical plants in nearby company towns so polluted the air that East St. Louis had one of the highest rates of child asthma in the United States. At the pitiful public housing projects in the city, raw sewage backed up into sinks and bathtubs, into shower rooms at a public school, and into a children’s playground, forming what Kozol described as “an oozing lake … a lagoon” filled with billions of bacteria where more than one hundred children played every day. And the city could not afford the $5,000 needed to fix the old vacuum truck used to unclog sewers. Dozens of children were discovered to have frightening amounts of lead in their blood and brains. Dangerously high levels of arsenic, mercury, and lead, as well as steroids used by the stockyards to plump up cattle, were detected in the soil. The mayor of East St. Louis announced he might have to sell city hall and six fire stations to meet the budget, which didn’t even have funds to heat city buildings or supply them with toilet paper.11
And yet the story of East St. Louis was not entirely a negative one.
Jacqueline Joyner and her older brother Al grew up poor in the 1960s in the South End of East St. Louis, in a tiny, badly heated house on Piggott Avenue between Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets. She later described her neighborhood as a “rough and tumble precinct”—and when children refer to their neighborhood as a “precinct,” you can be pretty sure it is known for crime.12
Jackie was an exceptionally athletic child. In 1969, when she turned seven, the city-supported Mary E. Brown Community Center opened near her house, and the gymnasium and basketball court became her second home. Eight years later, at Lincoln High School, she was beating all comers in track and field, her specialties being dashes, hurdles, and the long jump. In 1981, in her freshman year at UCLA, her mother collapsed from a bacterial infection back home in East St. Louis. Mary Joyner was only thirty-seven years old. Jackie rushed home and found her mother on a respirator with irreversible brain damage. Jackie was the one who finally had to make the decision to discontinue life support.
Devastated by grief, she quietly left her childhood home, which was filled with mourners, and walked in the gray January cold to the Mary E. Brown Community Center, where she hoped to spend a few minutes
shooting baskets to try and take her mind off the tragedy. She was stunned to discover that it was closed.
“I didn’t realize the center was boarded up,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Where do the kids go?’ … At the place that I had grown up and gotten used to, the doors were no longer open and I thought about the other kids in the neighborhood.”
At UCLA, Joyner married another young track star, Bob Kersee, who became her coach. By the time she graduated with a degree in history in 1986, she had become the greatest female athlete in the world. She tried several times to get the Mary E. Brown center reopened, but there was no money, and she was far from rich. Frustrated, she raised enough money to fly a group of children from East St. Louis to New York for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
In 1988, Jackie Joyner-Kersee set new records in the heptathlon and the long jump, and she would continue her dominance in international competition for much of the next decade. The same year, she and her husband established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center Foundation to raise funds for a recreational center for young East St. Louisans. The foundation raised twelve million dollars, and in 1999 and 2000, on a thirty-seven-acre site in East St. Louis, built the forty-one-thousand-square-foot Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center, affiliated with the national Boys and Girls Club. The Joyner-Kersee Center has its own stop on St. Louis’s MetroLink light rail system.13
In early July of 1997, St. Louisan Gary Kennedy, whose grandmother Katherine and father Samuel had escaped from the 1917 riot on a raft, led a ceremony in downtown East St. Louis to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the tragedy. Several hundred people from St. Louis and East St. Louis, including survivors of the riot and their descendants, joined the commemoration. Gary Kennedy said he wanted “to honor the people of both races who perished in the riot and to encourage unity and healing.” He also spoke of his father, who, after a long struggle with poverty—at one point, he made his living boxing on the streets of St. Louis—became the president of a local textile workers union and, in 1962, a St. Louis alderman. He served until his death in 1988. The following year, his son Terry, Gary’s twin brother, was elected to succeed him.14
Never Been a Time Page 29