Never Been a Time (32 page)

In the meantime, Illinois assistant attorney general C. W. Middlekauf had been busy in St. Clair County with his riot grand jury. On August 14, 105 people—eighty white men, eight of them policemen; two white women; and twenty-three black men—were indicted on charges growing out of the riot. Thirty-two men were charged with murder. Several weeks later, thirty-nine more persons were indicted, most of them white men, including Mayor Fred Mollman, who was charged with malfeasance. Other charges ranged from arson and assault with intent to murder to “malicious mischief.”
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In a long report, the all-white grand jury, which consisted mainly of German-American farmers and small businessmen from rural St. Clair County, traced the riot to the anger created by the importation of thousands of black workers from the South by East St. Louis industry, and particularly cited the use of black strikebreakers at the Aluminum Ore Company. “[T]he intent of employers to place the workers of one race at a disadvantage by notoriously favoring workers of another must draw down condemnation. The natural result was to precipitate a new form of aversion to the negro.”
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The jury, which had interviewed 390 witnesses, charged that unnamed “agitators” kept race hatred stirred up among both blacks and whites until it finally exploded. Meanwhile, “as racial tensions grew, indolent public officials heard the rumblings, but, overawed by cowardly inclinations, remained inactive.”

The jury reported that, on the evening before the July riot, not just one but two automobiles of white gunmen “made a number of trips” through black neighborhoods firing into the homes of blacks:

Engendered with false fears, negroes wantonly murdered policemen bent on aiding them. A rival flame of passion and unreasoning
violence—all introduced into the community by intriguing ringleaders—caused white men to draw guns and clubs and shoot and beat to death some of the oldest and most respected negro citizens of East St. Louis—negroes who had lived and worked in the community for a long time preceding the period of emigration of which the community has heard so much. We further believe that the hand of a strong and fearless public official could have restrained these atrocities.

The grand jury estimated that nearly one hundred people were killed, and 245 buildings were burned down. “East St. Louis was visited by one of the worst race riots in history, a siege of murder, brutality, arson and other crimes hitherto of such loathsome character as to challenge belief. But it is now doubly so because, after hearing all evidence, we believe the riots—at least the occurrences which led up to them—were deliberately plotted … There is a grave suspicion that a shrewd, criminal, invisible hand directed all the moves for weeks prior to July 2, to effect the results obtained.”

This was an extraordinary and shocking charge. Although the grand jury specifically blamed major industrialists in—or rather around—East St. Louis for stirring up racial hatred by bringing in excessive numbers of black workers, the panel did not identify the men wielding the “criminal, invisible hand” nor did it explain who could have benefited from the riot in the long run and thus have a motive to get it started. However, the point was made that one of the cars that drove gunmen through black neighborhoods on July 1, triggering the attack on the police car and its tragic consequences, ended up in front of the Commercial Hotel, which was “controlled by a leading politician.”
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Nothing further was said, either directly or by implication, about either political boss Locke Tarlton or his real estate partner, Thomas Canavan. But it is worth noting that, on the morning of July 3, with smoke hanging heavy in the air and angry white mobs still in the streets, the Reverend George Allison ran into Canavan, and remarked, “Mr. Canavan, this is deplorable. This is a terrible situation.”

“Yes,” Canavan replied, “but my GOD, something has got to be done, or the damn niggers will take the town.”

After talking to powerful citizens like Canavan, Allison said later, “I became convinced there was a concerted effort to run the negroes out of East
St. Louis”—not necessarily to kill them, he added, but to scare them so badly that they would never return.
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What about the widespread destruction of property owned by Tarlton and Canavan? According to both the
Post-Dispatch
and the
Journal
, the standard fire insurance policies of the period were void if the fire was caused by riot or insurrection. However, under Illinois law, the city could be held liable for damages for failure to provide protection from the rioters. Indeed, by July of 1921, the city of East St. Louis had paid $454,000 to liquidate claims growing out of the 1917 riot.
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The dozens of men and women indicted by the grand jury included a seventeen-year-old newsboy, a forty-nine-year-old blacksmith, a coal dealer, a railroad switchman, a baker, a bartender, and a saloonkeeper, as well as many men with no reported means of support. The predominance of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and German last names suggests that recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not play a major role in the riot. The youngest indicted were two fourteen-year-old boys. Most of the others were in their late teens or twenties, but several were in their forties—including forty-six-year-old Richard Brockway and Dr. I. H. King, a forty-three-year-old black physician indicted in the Coppedge killing. Many could not be arrested immediately because they had left town before the indictments had been issued. Some had joined the army, and those indicted on major charges who were not on a ship to France or already at the front were arrested and brought back to East St. Louis to stand trial.
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At least some of those who were arrested—perhaps as many as one third—lived outside of East St. Louis. None of those indicted on major charges worked for the Aluminum Ore Company, despite the role the company and its workers played in building up the white rage triggered by the riot. The rioters seem to defy classification, beyond the general observation that they tended to be men who worked with their hands or didn't work at all, at least not at anything legal.

Numerous people testified that Richard Brockway had called for and led attacks on blacks on July 2. Brockway was among the first arrested, and the hulking, headstrong security guard was injudiciously—but typically, it seems—garrulous about his role in the riot. He told the
Post-Dispatch
that he
had indeed led a group of men to the Labor Temple on the morning of July 2, but that his intent was to talk them into calming down and going home. He said he had gone into the South End the day before on official business for the streetcar company and had noticed that blacks were heavily armed. He insisted he warned the crowd at the Temple that “they would probably all be killed if they went into the neighborhood.” Brockway said he left the meeting and went to his home a few blocks north of downtown and had urged others to do the same. He said he did not come back downtown until the following morning. Several witnesses testified otherwise. Brockway was indicted for conspiracy to riot and assault with intent to kill, and his lawyers began a series of legal challenges that would delay his trial until mid-November.

Brockway was born in 1871 in the mountains of northern California, the son of a failed gold prospector. He lived most of his life in East St. Louis, although, according to some reports, he had spent some time in the South and publicly stated that he approved of the repressive treatment of blacks in that part of the country. He had worked with his father in the family grocery business and then sold liquor on his own for a few years, but apparently he did not succeed—at one point, he worked as a bartender for another man—and had taken a blue-collar job with a local railroad switching company. He was well known around town, a hail fellow well met, the grand vice protector of a fraternal lodge, the Knights and Ladies of Honor. He was a familiar figure at county Republican Party caucuses, but he jumped to Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose party in 1912 to run unsuccessfully for sheriff. He would later describe the Republican state's attorney, Hubert Schaumleffel, as a political rival who was “actively seeking his conviction” because Brockway had stood up to the East St. Louis bipartisan political machine controlled by real estate slum lord Locke Tarlton.
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In 1911, he became a security guard for the East St. Louis and Suburban Streetcar Company. That year, a conductor was murdered by a black man. Whites were outraged. Labor leader Alois Towers testified that “the race feeling” had been “pronounced” after the murder. More recently, the streetcars in East St. Louis had been a focus of white complaints about blacks who did not “know their place.”
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The riot trials were set to begin in mid-August, and the prosecution had chosen its first case carefully. A thirty-two-year-old white stockyard worker
named S. L. Schulz, the son of a wealthy southern Illinois farmer, was charged with several serious offenses, including brutally clubbing a white meatpacker who had come to the aid of a besieged black co-worker. Witnesses were prepared to identify Schulz as the leader of the “Stockyards gang” of rioters, accused of killing several blacks. Because of the race of the victim, Schulz's clubbing case seemed like an easy one to win, and he was one of the first to be prosecuted. After hearing jailhouse talk of harsh sentences in store for rioters—reportedly, he had overheard an official say that “hanging would be too good” for the rioters who had destroyed much of downtown—he chose to avoid a jury trial by confessing to the clubbing and pled guilty to assault to commit murder and conspiracy to riot. Other charges were dropped, but Judge George A. Crow startled him by sentencing him to fifteen years in the state penitentiary.
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Defense attorneys who might have been considering quick guilty pleas, hoping for light sentences for serious crimes, began asking for continuances, and no case actually came to trial until October.

On August 22, Mother Jones, the radical labor leader, visited East St. Louis. She spoke to packinghouse workers at a hall barely a block from the Labor Temple, where Richard Brockway seven weeks earlier had stoked the
fires of white racial hatred. For Mother Jones the audience of 150 included twenty-five policemen, most prominently new chief of police Frank Keating and new chief of detectives Lefty Neville. The Committee of One Hundred had successfully pressured the city to get rid of their riot-tainted predecessors.

Labor leader Mother Jones

Mother Jones urged that packinghouse workers—whose union had been destroyed by bringing in strikebreakers, many of them black—throw off the shackles of prejudice and join together, black and white, to affiliate themselves with organized labor. The meeting ended peacefully and without subsequent incident, although Mother Jones did make official ears perk up, bringing a standing ovation and prolonged applause from the seventy-five or eighty meatpackers in attendance by saying, “If we can't get what we want without a riot, let's have a riot.”
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In fact, a riot—the second major race riot of the summer of 1917—did erupt the next day almost one thousand miles to the southwest, in Houston. The riot in Houston might well never have happened had it had not been for the one in East St. Louis, which hovered like a dark cloud over Houston.

Like East St. Louis, Houston was patrolled by a police force that was considered corrupt and even dangerous by white citizens as well as blacks. Wartime pressures to clean up the vice-ridden city had resulted in racially selective enforcement of laws against prostitution and gambling, and there had been many charges in the first half of 1917 of police brutality against poor blacks. All year long and particularly that summer, according to historian Robert V. Haynes, blacks were almost routinely shot by police or falsely arrested for crimes they did not commit.
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In late July, a battalion of soldiers from the black Twenty-fourth Infantry, which had distinguished itself in the Indian Wars and in skirmishes along the Mexican border, was sent from the border to Houston to guard a military base under construction north of the city. The base, Camp Logan, would be used to house National Guard troops activated for the European War. The black soldiers had followed the news from East St. Louis in daily newspapers and in the
Chicago Defender
and were so horrified and saddened by what they read that they set up a fund to collect money for the victims of the riot. They were very apprehensive about the move to Houston. If something that terrible happened in the home state of Lincoln, what awful things might await them deep in the heart of East Texas? And when they arrived from the Mexican border, they found themselves in a racist bastion of the
Old South, a cotton port known for oppressive treatment of blacks, with strictly segregated, clearly labeled Jim Crow sections on the streetcars and toilets and water fountains. The soldiers objected to being treated like second-class citizens. In some cases, they objected loudly. In response, black soldiers were attacked by whites. Some were arrested on flimsy charges and beaten by police, routine treatment for men and women of color in Houston. But these men were soldiers in the uniforms of their nation, soldiers with a proud history of combat. They had been led to believe they were fighting for democracy. And they had access to weapons.