Never Been a Time (21 page)

Anderson was emotionally erratic, tough but brittle, given to bitter moods but refusing to sink into the cynicism so many of his colleagues used as
protection against the harsh imperfections of the world of city politics. He found another escape. Anderson was already drinking heavily, which was hardly unusual in the newspaper business for most of the twentieth century, but he went about it with a relentless lack of joy. He was relentless in his reporting, too, and in a few years he would win the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Teapot Dome scandal and would be one of the best-known correspondents in Washington.
²

That July morning, Anderson stood with a couple of other reporters and watched the crowd of white men gathered around the bullet-shattered, blood-stained Ford grow larger and more belligerent. Some of the men had heard about the shootings when leaving saloons early in the morning, and had not been to bed. Some were still drinking, clutching brown paper bags or openly sharing bare brown bottles.

A well-dressed man named John Seymour, one of a group of lawyers who hung around the city buildings looking for clients, approached the mob and said he would be happy to defend anyone who would “avenge the murders of the two policemen.” The crowd cheered. Policemen standing nearby bantered with the angry white men, and it became apparent to bystanders that they were making it clear, intentionally or not, that they would do nothing that day to stop white men from killing blacks.

Another reporter, A. B. Hendry of the small
St. Louis Star
, arrived at the police station about that time. He had just finished driving through black neighborhoods and described the mood as “a general gala day among the blacks.” Hendry regaled his colleagues and police with fanciful stories of blacks playing banjoes and singing, celebrating the uprising. The white mob hanging around the car on Main Street heard the stories and grew even angrier. Reporters hurried to the phones and called their offices, warning that trouble was coming and asking for legmen to help cover it.
³

Police told reporters that they suspected that Dr. Leroy Bundy had, in the words of the
St. Louis Republic
, “inflamed the negroes and formed the mob which killed policeman Coppedge.” Police were searching for Bundy, who could not be found. The
East St. Louis Daily Journal
speculated that he had “left the city.”
⁴

Colonel Stephen Orville Tripp, who was supposed to be in command of the National Guard troops expected momentarily, finally made it to the East St.
Louis city hall about eight A.M. His train had arrived at the downtown depot about seven A.M., but he apparently had not heard the conductor announce the stop and had stayed on the train as it crossed the wide river and rolled into downtown St. Louis. When he discovered his mistake, he caught a local streetcar back into Illinois. Tripp was fifty-six years old, a quartermaster—essentially a military storekeeper—with little experience in commanding troops and not much of a knack for it. Tripp had enlisted in the Illinois National Guard at the age of eighteen, and had become a cavalry officer in the army in the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century, but most of his military career had been in the quartermaster corps of the National Guard, in charge of supplies. At the time of the riot, he was assistant quartermaster general of the Illinois Guard.
⁵

Robert Boylan of the
Globe-Democrat
, a former soldier, met the colonel shortly after he had finally found his way to East St. Louis, and sized him up immediately. “Colonel Tripp was not in uniform. He wore an ordinary business suit and was one of the most lady-like officers I ever saw. He was a perfect gentleman, so far as he talked with me, but soldiers need to be told, they need to be pointed out. I saw him daily when he was here, several times a day, and I never saw him with any insignia of his rank. He wore a dark gray business suit.” Other witnesses said the gray summer-weight suit was seersucker, decidedly informal battle gear for a commanding officer soon to be in harm's way. They reported that Tripp tried to give orders to troops and push his way into the middle of enraged mobs with a banded straw boater perched on the top of his head.
⁶

Tripp found the mayor and the police chief in city hall and identified himself, telling Mayor Mollman he was in town “for the purpose of cooperating with him in the matter of enforcing law.” The mayor replied that he was not feeling well, and probably would not be much help. Mollman was uncommonly pale, his blue eyes were watery, and he seemed surprisingly inattentive, as if his mind was elsewhere. Mollman added that he had been “advised not to go out in the open.” Because Mollman had courted black leaders and had taken the bulk of the black vote in his two successful campaigns for mayor, he and some of his advisers were afraid he would be attacked by vengeful whites—like the mob growing on the street outside, staring in fury at the bloody wreck of an automobile at the curb and cursing blacks. For most of the day, the mayor stayed indoors.
⁷

Mollman said he would designate Thomas L. Fekete, the young acting city attorney, as his representative. And before retiring into his office, the mayor told Tripp that troops should be positioned on several key streets—Market, Walnut, and out front on Main. Fekete seemed full of pep, ready to do whatever was needed.
⁸
About that time, another high-ranking military officer arrived at the city hall command post. Lieutenant Colonel E. P. Clayton of the Illinois National Guard's Fourth Infantry had been visiting St. Louis and had read about the riot in that morning's papers. He, too, was in civilian clothes, but immediately called for his uniform to be sent from Springfield. Clayton had much more experience at commanding troops, and he had been in charge of closing down the May 28 riot. But Tripp outranked him.

There is a great deal of confusion about who was actually in charge of the troops in East St. Louis on July 2. Tripp recalled later that he had told Clayton, “Assume command of the military organizations upon their arrival and co-operate with the mayor in all matters for the enforcement of law.” But Clayton said Tripp personally took command of the troops and made decisions on the movement of men without consulting or even informing Clayton. Other observers insisted that the chain of command was never clear, and Clayton himself was overheard at the height of the riot to complain that he could do nothing because his authority had been “superseded” by Tripp.
⁹

Young attorney Thomas Fekete, the mayor's designated representative, seems to have been in a similar position to Clayton. He was given lots of responsibility (and the potential for lots of blame) but very little actual power. Essentially, no one was in charge in East St. Louis but the rioters.

Illinois national guardsmen began arriving shortly before nine A.M., beginning with Company G, at about half-strength with three officers and twenty-seven men.
¹⁰
“They came as they could,” Roy Albertson recalled. “They didn't come fully equipped as soldiers. Some were in overalls, some merely brought their rifles… They weren't organized in any way, they were just raw recruits, farmer's boys. And what they saw that day just overwhelmed them—amazed them.”
¹¹

Crates of ammunition arrived all day by train, and they were unloaded and stacked to the ceiling in vacant offices in city hall and the police station.
By evening, there were dozens of crates of bullets in the city hall complex, and dozens more at the army camp northeast of downtown, at Tenth Street and St. Louis Avenue. Most of the soldiers had loaded rifles or at least cartridge belts with bullets in them, and most soldiers had bayonets affixed to their rifles, even if they didn't have full military uniforms. “They could have quelled the riot with bayonets alone if they had wanted to,” an observer remarked.
¹²

Calvin Cotton, a black teamster who attended the AME church at Nineteenth and Bond and had seen the white men in the Ford shoot up his neighborhood the night before, was downtown about nine in the morning chatting about the incident with a friend, when a large, muscular white man walked over and stood practically on Cotton's toes, listening to what the black men were saying. Cotton and his friend stopped talking and stepped back. A policeman came around the corner, and the big white man said to him, “You better get these niggers off the street, because we're going to kill every one of them in a minute.” Cotton recognized the white man, but couldn't recall his name. Later, he identified him as Richard Brockway, a security guard for the streetcar company.

Brockway, a strong, bulky man in his mid-forties, was well known as a tough guy and a brawler. The policeman listened to Brockway rail for a minute or two, threatening to kill blacks if they didn't get off the street immediately, and then he just turned and walked away.

Cotton quickly crossed the street to a real estate office. About ten minutes later, he heard shooting. He went to the window of the real estate office and saw a black man lying on the sidewalk near where Brockway had been standing. He wasn't moving. Brockway had disappeared. Cotton walked quickly out the side door, which opened onto Main Street, and caught a streetcar across the river to St. Louis.
¹³

Brockway had gone to a meeting at the Labor Temple. He and several hundred other angry whites met for about an hour. Fairly quickly, control of the meeting was taken by Brockway. The security guard and a few like-minded men stirred up the crowd with inflammatory speeches, calling for whites to form a “home protective league” to defend themselves and, if necessary, to strike out at blacks. He recommended that everyone go home
immediately after the meeting, get a gun, and come back downtown, ready for battle.
¹⁴

Black plainclothes policeman W. H. Mills read about the shooting of Coppedge and Wodley in the morning papers and went to police headquarters. Mills and his partner, W. Green, were at the station when a report came in by telephone. “They were killing a Negro up on Illinois and Collinsville Avenue,” Mills recalled. Mills and Green were sent out to the South End to “instruct all the Negroes to stay off the streets” and then go home and look after their families. The other four black policemen were told the same thing. By late morning, there were no black policemen—and very few white ones—on the streets of East St. Louis.
¹⁵

Earl Jimmerson, the labor leader and county supervisor, also came downtown that morning and was horrified to see the shattered and blood-spattered police car across from city hall. He found the mayor and the police chief inside the city hall complex and said, “If I was you fellows, I would move that Ford away from in front of the police station. Take it some place where people can't see it.” Eventually, the city officials took his advice, but by then thousands of East St. Louisans had seen the car and absorbed its enraging message.
¹⁶

Walking across the street to a cigar store in the Illmo Hotel, Jimmerson encountered a porter he knew—”a very nice little colored fellow, got a family,” he later recalled.

“Herb,” Jimmerson said, “if I was you I would take my family and go across the river. It looks like trouble here.”

The young man replied, “Mr. Jimmerson, I haven't got any money to go across the river and no place to take them when I get over there.”

“Well, go over and get under a bridge if you have to,” Jimmerson said.

A crowd of white men walked by, talking angrily and cursing blacks. The porter drew back into the shadows and watched them for a moment and then, when they had passed, he slipped away.

The Reverend George W. Allison was in a lawyer's office on the fifth floor of the Metropolitan Building on Missouri Avenue when he heard shots. He hurried to the window. Two or three black men in overalls had been working on the streetcar tracks, but they dropped their tools and began to walk quickly away. A mob of white men was rushing toward them. A black
man was grabbed and attacked, but he broke free and ran. Allison rushed to the mayor's office a few blocks away. He told Mollman trouble was coming, suggested he deputize Allison and eight or ten other good men, and they would go grab the whites who were making trouble and shut them up in city hall. “Tell them, ‘The first man that comes down these stairs will get killed in his tracks,' and you will break this thing up.”

But the mayor said he would rather wait for the National Guard to deal with the problems.
¹⁷

By ten o'clock, several dozen national guardsmen had been scattered around downtown. Reporter G. E. Popkess of the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
talked to a few on Main Street near city hall and they all said the same thing, “We have no orders.” As he was talking to the group, one of the militiamen broke away and strolled over to a white man standing nearby, on the edge of a loud mob clearly waiting for something to happen. In a conversational tone, the militiaman asked, “Got your nigger yet?”

The white man grinned and replied, “I'll get mine by sundown today, I guarantee you that.”
¹⁸

At the Labor Temple, someone—it may have been Richard Brockway—got the crowd growling with angry assent by saying he had lived in the South, where they knew how to deal with uppity blacks. The meeting broke up when Brockway shouted, “We're going to get some niggers today,” and strode out of the building to loud cheers. Most of the men went home, some to hunker down and try to stay out of trouble, others to get their guns, but a couple of dozen followed Brockway down the steps and into the street. As the small mob moved south, a black man got in the way and stumbled to the ground. Brockway pulled out a pistol and shot him, pumping the trigger five times as if to be sure the man was dead.
¹⁹

Another black man got in the way, and several white men grabbed him, but someone from the crowd yelled, “Let him go. He's just an old barbershop nigger.” The white men left the old black man lying half-conscious on the sidewalk.