Never Been a Time (10 page)

During the migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a few thousand Southern blacks moved north to East St. Louis, got menial jobs in the growing number of plants in the area, and found homes downtown and south of Broadway in what became known as the South End. Perhaps the first black man of note to travel north to East St. Louis was a poor young Alabama musician named William Christopher Handy, who visited briefly in 1892. He spent a few weeks in East St. Louis, and got a job working for a company that manufactured railroad equipment. Years later, in a letter to a friend, he recalled, “I … pawned my watch for food and lodging to my employer, who stood in with corrupt East St. Louis Police. This [black] man took my two weeks' wages, and kept my watch for the board and lodging, and wouldn't let me have my laundry and clothes. I went to the police for redress, and they threatened to take me in for vagrancy if I pressed the charge. If you don't think that in those days there was corruption in East St. Louis, you have but to do a little research.”

One night Handy was sleeping beneath a pier of the Eads Bridge on the Missouri side of the river when he was awakened by black hoboes plucking homemade guitars and singing a lament about East St. Louis. “It had numerous one-line verses,” he later recalled, “and they would sing it all night.” The song went on and on, but it kept returning to the same two lines:

 

I walked all the way from old East St. Louis
,
And I didn't have but one po' measly dime
.
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It was one of the first times he heard the blues. Handy wrote that “the primitive Southern Negro” would “bear down on the third and seventh notes of the scale, slurring between major and minor.” The eerie modal sound, like nothing that came out of Europe, stayed with him. Handy would use flatted thirds and sevenths in his own blues-based compositions, and those two kinds of notes became known as “blue notes.” It is worth mentioning that Handy and the singing black hoboes may have had the blues in St. Louis, but they got them across the Mississippi in East St. Louis.
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By the early twentieth century, St. Louis had become a prosperous industrial city sometimes called “Old Smoky.” Its furnaces, fueled by sulfurous southern Illinois soft coal, polluted the air so badly that you sometimes couldn't see half a block down the street. Rich men built larger and larger mansions further and further west, taking advantage of the prevailing west winds to keep their eyes and lungs clear of the very pollution that provided their fortunes. A large middle class moved into the sturdy brick houses the rich had vacated, still comfortable, if noticeably etched by acid rain.

East St. Louis, downwind of the pungent sky-darkening pollution of the larger city to the west, also developed a middle class, but a small one that tended to live in modest brick and frame houses built with its members in mind, and the wealth flowed across the river to St. Louis, or north and east to Chicago and New York. East St. Louis was a poor city, which was made daily poorer by the crooked politicians and thieves who ran it through most of its history, and by its absentee landlords, most of whom didn't even pay taxes to support East St. Louis.

In the 1870s, East Coast money built the St. Louis National Stock Yards, but not in St. Louis, nor even in East St. Louis. The stockyards lay just north of the East St. Louis city limits in unincorporated St. Clair County. The Vanderbilts and other stockyard investors built a fancy hotel with a four-star restaurant that, naturally, specialized in beef. Soon meatpackers like Armour and Swift began moving in, right next to livestock pens that could accommodate 15,000 cattle, 10,000 sheep, and 20,000 hogs ready for slaughter. That capacity would double by 1917. None of these enterprises, known collectively as the Meat Trust, paid taxes in East St. Louis, although they polluted the city's air and water and depended on the city's fire department for
help if a cattle shed suddenly burst into flame. The northeast side of East St. Louis, adjacent to the stockyards, stank of burnt cowhide and rotting pig guts. In 1907, Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel
The Jungle
exposed filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry and led to the passage of federal meat inspection laws. About the same time, East St. Louis began annexing unincorporated land. The Meat Trust responded to the threats by wrapping itself in a legal cloak, creating the village of National City, Illinois, with about 250 human residents, a mayor picked by the Trust, and a tax assessor who was also on the payroll of one of the meatpackers.

By then, William Neidringhaus, a St. Louis robber baron, had expanded his steel works into Illinois. He bought land north of East St. Louis and created Granite City. Other wealthy industrialists built plants in Granite City and on unincorporated land nearby, and eventually companies like Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis and the Aluminum Ore Company, an ancestor of Alcoa whose principal investors included Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh, would also have their own little towns, relatively free of taxes and pouring out sulfur-laden smoke that seemed to find its way freely across municipal limits. At the time of the First World War, the largest single employer of East St. Louis men and women was the Aluminum Ore Company, which refined ore from Arkansas as part of the national aluminum trust. The company sprawled across the prairie in unincorporated
St. Clair County bordering East St. Louis, and its political clout was sufficient to beat back any attempts by St. Clair County to increase its minimal taxes. The Rockefellers' Standard Oil put a notably polluting refining plant in Wood River, in Madison County north of East St. Louis, and soon other refiners came and joined in.
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As late as the end of the twentieth century, “Wood River” remained a synonym in the St. Louis area for lingering chemical pollution that could maim and kill and was particularly dangerous to small children.

The Aluminum Ore Company

As East St. Louis became known as the “Pittsburgh of the West” and, perhaps less flatteringly, as the “Hoboken of St. Louis,” plants spread across the unregulated landscape, most of them paying wages that guaranteed little more than a lifetime of poverty. The first major strike in the East St. Louis area in the twentieth century came in the summer of 1904 at the packing houses of National City. At the same time, across the river, St. Louis was hosting its World's Fair, with millions of visitors from around the world coming to see the astonishing technological artifices of what came to be called the American Century. The St. Louis World's Fair was an unprecedented display of American might and ingenuity that trumpeted the Darwinian supremacy of the white race. A few miles and a wide river to the east of the fairgrounds where millions watched the Zulus and the pygmies dance near model industrial plants, Swift and Armour called out the Pinkertons and brought in strikebreakers to crush the uprising of men who butchered cows and pigs and waded in blood for a living.

Although some of the strikebreakers were black, the majority were recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. They stepped into jobs unwillingly vacated by men who called themselves “Americans” or “native Americans,” the sons and grandsons of Irishmen and Scotsmen and Germans. The union men referred to the European strikebreakers as “white Sambos” or, if their skin was sufficiently swarthy, simply “niggers.” As the century advanced, the southern and eastern European immigrants began to be accepted into the workplaces, the unions, the neighborhoods, and even the families of the northern European immigrants who had preceded them. In a sociological term of more recent currency, the Italians and Greeks and Poles and Turks “achieved whiteness,” while African Americans remained the target of white America's racial prejudice. Most of the African Americans who had served as strikebreakers—and earned the persistent hatred of white union members for
doing it—were gone from the stockyards within a few years, only to be summoned back the next time there was a strike.
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Nationwide, bringing in black replacement workers was a common tactic of management in the bitter labor battles of the era. In Chicago, black strikebreakers were used to defeat stockyard strikes in 1894 and in 1904. Blacks were physically assaulted in both strikes, and at least one black worker was killed in 1904. But it was a teamsters' strike in 1905 that seared the link between blacks and strikebreakers into the consciousness of Chicago whites, and led to blacks being referred to contemptuously as “a scab race.” The strike lasted more than three months and labor violence spilled over into the city as a whole. In the early weeks, blacks were recruited and transported to Chicago by the trainload. And as they tried to go to work at plants or deliver milk, coal, ice, and other commodities, they were attacked, beaten, shot, and stabbed. The city council, fearing a widespread riot, hotly debated the question of “whether the importation of hundreds of Negro workers is not a menace to the community and should not be restricted,” and the employers' association agreed to stop bringing in black strikebreakers but refused to discharge those already working.

“You have the Negroes in here to fight us,” the president of the teamsters union told the employers' association, “and we answer that we have the right to attack them wherever found.” Not only strikebreakers but ordinary blacks were attacked in the streets, particularly in a white working-class neighborhood bordering what was becoming the Black Belt on Chicago's South Side. Even schoolchildren joined in the attacks, gathering by the hundreds to throw rocks at scabs.
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Blacks fought back, some of them with guns. After two black strikebreakers leaving work fired into a jeering crowd and killed an eleven-year-old white boy, enraged whites stormed black neighborhoods, and met armed black resistance. Black men were dragged off of streetcars and beaten, and a white bartender killed a black man in a saloon brawl. For a week, blacks and whites fought in the streets of Chicago. By the end of the strike, almost twenty people, black and white, had been killed, and more than four hundred seriously injured.

The period was also marked by violence against blacks in the smaller cities of downstate Illinois, where antiblack bigotry was flavored by a sometimes deceptively bucolic racial climate. The farming and mining country of
southern Illinois was geographically and culturally closer to the South than it was to the burgeoning industrial giant of Chicago. What that could mean for unwary blacks was demonstrated graphically in 1908 by the riot in Springfield discussed in the previous chapter and in 1909 by a lurid racial murder in Cairo, a cotton port at the southern tip of the Little Egypt region of Illinois, where the Mississippi meets the Ohio. Cairo and environs differed little in racial attitudes from Jackson or Natchez or Baton Rouge. An accusation that a black man had raped and murdered a white woman triggered a day of violence. The accused rapist was wrestled from custody, dragged down the main street of Cairo by a rope around his neck and hanged from a steel lamppost. According to Ida Wells-Barnett, who came down from her home in Chicago in the immediate aftermath of the lynching, five hundred bullets were fired into the body. Some of the bullets severed the rope and the body fell to the ground. Wells-Barnett wrote, “The body was taken near to the place where the corpse of the white girl had been found. Here they cut off his head, stuck it on a fence post, built a fire around the body and burned it to a crisp.” Later that evening, the mob, still thirsty for vigilante justice, broke into the city jail and lynched a white man who had been accused of murdering his wife.
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Photographs of the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the lynching of the black man in Cairo were widely circulated on a popular set of picture postcards.

By 1910, St. Louis had grown to a population of 687,000 people, about 44,000 of them black. Its growth was slowing somewhat. Chicago, with 2,185,000 people, had long ago overtaken the old riverboat city and become the commercial capital of the Midwest. But St. Louis remained the fourth-largest city in America. Across the Mississippi, East St. Louis grew too, and by the 1910 census it had about fifty-eight thousand residents, most of them blue-collar workers and their families. Blacks made up about 10 percent of the population. Within five years, the black population of East St. Louis had increased to about seventy-nine hundred people—about 11 percent of the total. Then America's first great black migration began in earnest.
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On August 4, 1914, Germany marched into Belgium to begin the Great War, and while American industrial plants ratcheted up their output to supply the European armies, immigration slowed sharply, and hundreds of
thousands of European immigrants went back home to fight for their countries of birth, leaving jobs open in plants across the country.

At the same time, the boll weevil, which had crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, in 1892 and steadily marched to the north and the east, was devastating cotton crops in much of Mississippi and parts of Alabama. Also, mechanization was eliminating much agricultural handwork, and many thousands of Southern blacks, sharecroppers, and hired hands alike found themselves out of work.