Never Been a Time (37 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 several 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.
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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.”
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