Never Been a Time

The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked
the Civil Rights Movement

HARPER BARNES

WALKER & COMPANY
NEW YORK

For Roseann Weiss
In memory of Julia Davis

Germany [in World War I] has nothing on East St. Louis when it comes to “frightfulness.” Indeed in one respect Germany does not even approximate her ill-famed sister. In all the accounts given of German atrocities, no one, we believe, has accused the Germans of taking pleasure in the sufferings of their victims. But these [white] rioters combined business and pleasure.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

 

There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition.

—Eugene Redmond, poet laureate of East St. Louis

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: A History of Violence

1. Brotherly Love

2. Reconstruction and Redemption: From Hope to Despair

3. A Harvest of Disaster

4. East St. Louis and the Great Exodus

5. A Nest of Crime and Corruption

6. The May Riot

7. Shots in the Dark

8. The July Riot Begins

9. “This Was the Apocalypse”

10. A Drama of Death

11. Legacy of a Massacre

12. Judgment Days

13. The Deal with the Devil

Epilogue: The East St. Louis Blues

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Photo Credits

By the same Author

A note on the Author

Imprint

[T]he East St. Louis race riot in 1917 was supposed to be about … black workers replacing white workers in the packing houses. So, the white workers got mad and went on a rampage killing all them black people … just shot them down like they were out shooting pigs or stray dogs. Shot them in their houses, shot babies and women. Burned down houses with people in them and hung some black men from lampposts. Anyway, black people who survived used to talk about it. When I was coming up in East St. Louis, black people I knew never forgot what sick white people had done to them back in 1917.

—Miles Davis

The mob and entire white populace of East St. Louis had a Roman holiday. They feasted on the blood of the Negro.

—Marcus Garvey

 

Race riots, as black militant H. Rap Brown famously suggested in the incendiary 1960s, are “as American as cherry pie.” Long before the black riots of the sixties, whites rioted against blacks in cities across the country. Decades before the Civil War, in such Northern bastions of abolition as Cincinnati, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, and in smaller cities and towns throughout the North, blacks were attacked in the streets by gangs of whites and their neighborhoods were invaded and sacked. African Americans were severely beaten and even killed, and black homes and
institutions—including schools, churches, and even orphanages—were destroyed by white mobs long before the end of slavery. Carter G. Woodson, the pioneering black scholar who became known as the Father of Black History, wrote, “The Negroes … were not generally welcomed in the North. Many of the northerners who sympathized with the oppressed blacks in the South never dreamt of having them as their neighbors.”
¹

In the second decade of the twentieth century alone, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to the booming industrial cities of the North, wooed by the promise of jobs and freedom. The migration intensified in the second half of the decade in an industrial boom fueled by the First World War. Blacks arrived in Northern cities by the trainloads, and many whites responded to the African American incursion with a horrific series of racial confrontations, riots, and massacres that broke out in cities across the nation, beginning in the summer of 1917 in East St. Louis.
²

The East St. Louis race riot was not only the first but officially the deadliest of a series of devastating racial battles that swept through American cities in the World War I era. The death toll in East St. Louis was at least forty-eight, a figure not exceeded in the twentieth century until the 1992 Rodney King riot in Los Angeles, with fifty-five deaths. Officially, thirty-nine African American men, women, and children were killed in East St. Louis. But, as with other riots in the period, including those in Tulsa and Chicago, it is likely that the official East St. Louis figures on the deaths of black men, women, and children, many of them undocumented, are too low. Historians, journalists, and civil rights leaders who have studied the East St. Louis riot believe that more than one hundred African Americans, and perhaps as many as two hundred, were killed in the impoverished industrial city on the east bank of the Mississippi, with many of their bodies, including those of small children and infants, burned beyond human recognition in gasoline-ignited shacks or dumped in the deep, fast-flowing waters of America's largest river and its sewage-ridden tributaries. What happened in East St. Louis in the summer of 1917, wrote Gunnar Myrdal in
American Dilemma
, his landmark study of race in this country, was not so much a riot as a “terrorization or massacre,” a “mass lynching.”
³

East St. Louis, Illinois, an industrial and meatpacking town of about seventy-five thousand people, about twelve thousand of them black, lay
across the Mississippi River from what was in 1910 America's fourth-largest city, St. Louis, Missouri. In the years leading up to 1917, blacks had moved North to both cities by the thousands, looking for work. Many blacks could not find jobs and ended up homeless or crowded into shanties in the river bottoms at the southwest end of East St. Louis, and sensationalist stories in some local newspapers led many whites to believe blacks were on a rampage of crime. But the city was riddled with vice and corruption long before large numbers of blacks came to it in search of work. A Wild West atmosphere had long prevailed in East St. Louis, further fueled by a wartime boomtown mentality in a city with thousands of jobs dependent on military contracts.
⁴

Although there is little evidence of the “reign of crime” blacks were accused of, there were a few particularly lurid crimes with racial overtones, at least as they were presented in the local press, and whites generally blamed blacks for the increasing dangers of walking the streets. Perhaps more importantly, blacks were competing with whites for jobs, encouraged by the powerful white industrialists who controlled the city from behind the scenes, polluting its air and streams while paying very low taxes. Employers used non-union strikebreakers, some of them black, to force white unions into disarray and collapse, and continued to lure blacks North with promises of jobs long past the time when the job market was saturated.

Blacks were blamed for the city's troubles, and were attacked by white mobs in the street throughout the spring and early summer of 1917, leading up to a full-scale riot on July 2. By the end of the long, sweltering midsummer day, hundreds of blacks had been brutally attacked, thousands fled the city, and more than three hundred homes and places of business had been destroyed by fire. At military and congressional hearings in the aftermath of the riot, dozens of eyewitnesses, black and white, described their experiences in sometimes very painful detail, and many of these descriptions are quoted here for the first time.

In an atmosphere of racial and economic fear, whites and blacks had been pitted against one another by the purposeful acts of wealthy and powerful whites. It was the work not just of industrialists but of politicians as well, ranging from the Democratic mayor of East St. Louis to the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, who used a “Southern Strategy” in his bitterly fought reelection campaign in the fall of 1916 that increased the division between black and white in the region that included East St. Louis. In
the riot's immediate aftermath, the tragedy was investigated by, among others, NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois and pioneering black feminist and anti-lynch-mob activist Ida Wells-Barnett, both of whom interviewed survivors and wrote of the terror visited upon the twelve thousand black citizens of East St. Louis. Their accounts, which are also part of this book, became rallying points for the growth of the NAACP, the Urban League, and other black organizations, including Marcus Garvey's “back-to-Africa” United Negro Improvement Association.

The terrible events of July 2, 1917, were the precursor to a horrific riot later that summer in Houston and to the Red Summer of 1919, when two dozen American cities and towns—including Chicago and Washington, D.C.—exploded in riot. Two years later, a riot tore through Tulsa, and once again the official death toll—thirty-six people, two thirds of them black—was widely considered to represent only a fraction of the tragic reality of the racial massacre.

The riots of the World War I period, one of the most violent times in the history of the world, were fueled by white resentment over blacks moving into previously segregated neighborhoods and jobs; sensationalist reports of black crime; lax, corrupt, and biased law enforcement; exploitation of or capitulation to racism by business, labor, and political leaders; overcrowded, crime-festering slums; neglect of the central cities by absentee owners; and deep poverty among both races. Ultimately, of course, like all racial confrontations in America from its earliest history to the present, the riots were part of the deadly legacy of slavery.

Racial prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists… In the North, the white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that separates him from the degraded race, and he keeps the Negro at a distance all the more carefully … lest one day they be confounded together.

—Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, 1835

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Northern states one by one officially outlawed slavery, generally in gradual stages. In 1800, about eighty-three thousand blacks lived in the North. Between then and the Civil War, more than two hundred thousand escaped slaves, freedmen, and blacks from the Caribbean moved to the North—often at great peril—seeking asylum, social and political freedom, jobs, and equality. Instead, they met harsh inequality, widespread segregation, and cruelly limited opportunities for employment. As their population grew, more and more so-called Black Laws were passed that sharply curtailed or eliminated their right to vote, to educate their children in public schools, and to use the courts to ensure their rights.
¹

In the first decades of the century, the largest concentration of free blacks in the Northern United States was in Philadelphia, the location of the worst racial attacks. Philadelphian Charles Godfrey Leyland remarked in his memoirs of the period, “Whoever shall write a history of Philadelphia from the Thirties to the era of the Fifties will record a popular period of turbulence and outrages so extensive as to now appear almost incredible.”
²

Philadelphia was founded as the City of Brotherly Love by the Quakers, who would become vehement opponents of slavery. The city was the headquarters for such prominent abolitionists as Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Grace and Robert Douglass, head of a family of blacks active against slavery; and, in the 1850s, legendary Underground Railroad conductor Sojourner Truth. As the closest major Northern city to the slave states of the Southeast, Philadelphia became the Promised Land—Canaan—to thousands of Southern blacks in the first decades of the nineteenth century, an important stop on the Underground Railroad.

Between 1800 and 1830, the black population of Philadelphia more than doubled to over fifteen thousand. Although most Philadelphia blacks were laborers or servants, African Americans also became clergymen and teachers, doctors and lawyers, carpenters and musicians. They founded black churches and schools and charitable societies, and some of them became quite prosperous, even wealthy, inevitably arousing envy and anger in less-fortunate whites.