Never Been a Time (12 page)

Many of them were without jobs as well. Some industrialists used labor
agents and newspaper advertisements to lure blacks North with inflated promises, creating a highly visible ready reserve of workers desperate for jobs in case of a strike. As a result, when they arrived in the North, many blacks discovered there were no jobs at all, or that the jobs that were available paid well short of the living wage they had been promised. Some were able to find other jobs, usually at much lower pay than they had expected; a few went back to the South; some ended up on the streets, increasing social friction. But blacks continued arriving weekly in the cities of the North. Even blacks who had jobs paying relatively decent wages down South were heading North in numbers that were alarming to Southern whites. The
Telegraph
in Macon, Georgia, reported:

Everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses—that is, everybody but those farmers who waked up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on their places gone—to Cleveland, to Pittsburgh, to Chicago, to Indianapolis. Better jobs, better treatment, higher pay—the bait held out is being swallowed by thousands of them about us. And while our very solvency is being sucked from underneath us, we go about our affairs as usual—our police raid pool rooms for “loafing Negroes,” bring in 12, keep them in the barracks all night, and next morning find that 10 of them have steady jobs … Our country officers hear of a disturbance at a Negro resort and bring in fifty-odd men, women, boys, and girls to spend the night in jail, to make a bond at 10 percent, to hire lawyers, to mortgage half of two months wages to get back their jobs Monday morning, although but a half dozen could have been guilty of the disorderly conduct … It was a week following [such arrests] that several Macon employers found good Negroes, men trained in their work, secure and respected in their jobs, valuable assets to their white employers, had suddenly left and gone to Cleveland, “where they didn't arrest 50 niggers for what three of 'em done.”
²⁴

The U.S. Department of Labor asked dozens of blacks why they had left the South. The reasons they gave included “ravages of boll-weevil, floods,
change of crop system, low wages, poor housing on plantations, inadequate school facilities, inadequate crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, the desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and finally advice of white friends in the South, where crops had failed.”
²⁵

As the northward migration was gathering strength, the flames of racial prejudice, North and South, were fed by the unprecedented emotional power of a brilliantly constructed new movie celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and portraying Reconstruction Era blacks as ape men lusting after virginal white women. The cinematic innovations of one of the most talented filmmakers of the twentieth century—innovations such as multiple cameras, fast cutting, parallel editing, accelerating pacing, and point-of-view cinematography—made David Wark Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation
, initially released early in 1915, an emotional powerhouse. Over the next two years it played across the country, inspiring pickets and protests by the NAACP and, in some cities, attacks on blacks in the streets and brawls between blacks and whites.
The Birth of a Nation
was the most viscerally exciting movie of its time, and the most popular. It is no coincidence that the Klan reemerged as a powerful force, and lynching showed a marked increase as
The Birth of a Nation
was packing in crowds all over the country.

When it was shown in St. Louis, pickets from the NAACP competed for attention with men and women from something called the United Welfare Association, a group of white neighborhood associations well funded by real estate moguls. The United Welfare Association was gathering signatures on an initiative petition to enact “an ordinance to prevent ill-feeling, conflict and collision between the white and colored races” by requiring “separate blocks for residence,” as well as segregation in churches and dance halls. Similar block-by-block segregation laws had been passed in other American cities in Southern and border states, including Louisville, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Richmond. These laws would be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, but not before the citizens of St. Louis had given a clear indication of the racial mood of the area by voting approval of enforced segregation by a margin of 3 to 1.
²⁶

A special showing of
The Birth of a Nation
was arranged at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian and friend of the author
of
The Clansman
, the novel on which the movie was based. Legend has it that Wilson was the one who gave the famous description of the movie, “Like writing history with lightning,” and added, “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
²⁷

Most of the blacks who arrived in East St. Louis between 1915 and 1917 were men from the slums of Southern cities like Memphis or Jackson or from the impoverished cotton farms of the Mississippi Delta. Some of them had rough manners. Few of them were used to the confusing racial signals of the North in general and the lower Midwest in particular, where they were supposed to be equal to whites, but were not treated that way. They arrived by the coachload and even the trainload. William Roach, who ran the Illinois State Free Employment Bureau in East St. Louis during that period, recalled that he talked to blacks as soon they arrived in town and “they told me they got cheap tickets, and that they were told by the white folks in the South, or some white man told them—sometimes the railroad agents would say it—that there was plenty of work in East St. Louis, good wages, and when they got to East St. Louis we didn't have anything for them at the time.

“When a great number of them came in,” he said, “I notified all the railroad superintendents that we had a great many laborers on hand, colored track laborers, and I got jobs for pretty near all of them out of town. That was in 1915, and [even] a part of 1914, and I shipped a great many of them off… I shipped some of them to East Chicago, to Ohio, Indiana, Baltimore, Buffalo … all the way to Kansas City… I done all I could to take care of them. I notified the police department to send in every idle man they could get hold of, and that helped out too.” Many thousands of men passed through his office in downtown East St. Louis between 1915 and 1917. At times, Roach would ship out three coaches, each holding eighty men, twice a week, which came to two thousand men a month.

Many of the men, he said, had spent their last cent on an excursion ticket to East St. Louis, hoping for work. “Some white fellows told them there was good wages in East St. Louis, in the north, and they headed this way,” he recalled. In late 1915, as fall turned into winter, hundreds arrived every week, many with no luggage, wearing worn cotton overalls and thin work shirts. The men were from the Deep South, and were completely unprepared for snow and sleet and the freezing winds that blew from the west across the icy Mississippi.

So many of the men were able to buy tickets at such cheap rates that Roach became suspicious, and asked the United States attorney to find out who was subsidizing black migration. He never got an answer. But, he said, it seemed relevant that most of the men he talked to said they had been promised jobs on the railroad, and it was the railroads that were giving them the extraordinarily cheap rates.
¹

As job markets in other cities became saturated, the black men without jobs often stayed in East St. Louis, sleeping in vacant lots or alleys and begging on the streets. Some got hold of cheap guns and pulled holdups. Some of the victims were white. Although the official crime statistics for that period disappeared at least half a century ago into the dark maw of East St. Louis's corrupt city government, there is little question that the murder, rape, and robbery rate increased in the early years of the Great War, and no question that some of the worst crimes—or at least some of the most highly publicized crimes—were committed by blacks. But the abundance of street crime in East St. Louis could hardly be blamed solely on blacks in a city that essentially had been surrendered by its leaders—its politicians and businessmen and police—to thugs and gangsters, gamblers and prostitutes, and to saloon keepers and their clientele.

East St. Louis was nationally known as one of the most corrupt and crime-ridden cities in America. There was a widespread legend that a detective from New York who was visiting East St. Louis walked down Broadway one day and recognized three men—none of them apparently with either of the other two—and each of them was wanted for a felony in New York. All were white.
²

In the wide-open red-light district known as the Valley, within sight of city hall and the main police station, hundreds of prostitutes, white and black, openly walked the streets or tapped on windows to lure potential customers inside—where, often, they were beaten and robbed rather than sexually entertained. The prostitutes worked twelve-hour shifts and were divided
by the local vernacular into “women of the day” and “women of the night.” They were often arrested, as were the pimps and muggers and gunmen who worked the Valley and adjoining areas of downtown East St. Louis. But those who hired the right lawyers and paid the requisite bribes to the police and the low-level city courts run by justices of the peace were soon released and working again after paying fines. Indeed, the East St. Louis political system depended upon bribes and fines to supplement the earnings of badly paid police and unsalaried justices of the peace, whose income came from court fees.

Most of the prostitutes and pimps and thugs in East St. Louis were white, even if much of the citizenry was led to believe otherwise. The
East St. Louis Daily Journal
emphasized and sensationalized black crime, particularly black on white crime. As a result, many East St. Louis whites came to feel as if they were under invasion, particularly on weekends when hundreds of blacks, coming and going, packed the downtown railroad station and roamed the nearby streets looking for food, drink, and amusement.

Despite the long-standing reputation of the state of Illinois as a haven for persecuted blacks, and despite a considerable body of nineteenth-century legislation forbidding discrimination in the state, much of public life in southern Illinois was segregated. In factories, blacks had separate washrooms and lunch rooms and were given the most menial jobs. Schools had legally been desegregated in the state of Illinois since 1874, but white children in East St. Louis and environs were assigned to all-white schools, and black kids to all-black schools. Although the Illinois legislature in 1885 had passed one of the nation's first laws forbidding discrimination in public accommodation, bars, restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses were strictly segregated in the southern half of the state, as were all but the lowest whorehouses.
³

Still, in the years before the Great War, many blacks and whites had lived very close to one another in East St. Louis—and sometimes worked side by side—without a great deal of trouble. Years later, at the height of the Depression but before the Second World War once again ripped the social fabric apart—with the memories of the riot somewhat dimmed, although certainly not forgotten—East St. Louis was again a city where a mixed population lived together in relative tolerance. Musician Miles Davis, the son of a dentist, grew up in the 1930s in East St. Louis near Fifteenth Street and Bond Avenue, where blacks and whites lived and worked very close to one another and racial incidents were rare.

The Davis family lived above a drugstore in their early years, as the father was establishing his practice, and next door was a tavern owned by a black man who played saxophone. Nearby was a soul food restaurant, but next to it was a white-owned dry goods store. “It was run by a German lady,” Davis recalled. “All along 15th paralleling the river toward Bond street were all kinds of stores … owned by blacks, or Jews, or Germans, or Greeks, or Armenians, who had most of the cleaning places. Over on 16th and Broadway this Greek family owned a fish market and made the best jack salmon sandwiches in East St. Louis. I was friends with the son of the guy who owned it.” But even as a boy growing up in a neighborhood where black and white kids played together, Davis, with the paradoxical “double-consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois identified as a necessary and crucial aspect of African American thinking, also understood that most East St. Louis whites were, as he put it, “racist to the bone.”
⁴

The sensationalist
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, an evening paper that was closely tied to the Democratic Party on racial and other issues, was East St. Louis's principal newspaper. But the five mainstream daily newspapers in St. Louis—the
Post-Dispatch
, the
Globe-Democrat
, the
Republic
, the
Star
, and the
Times
—covered East St. Louis, and were read by East St. Louisans. All five St. Louis papers had reporters assigned to East St. Louis and most had East St. Louis offices. The two most important, and most widely circulated, of the St. Louis papers were the morning
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, which was known for solid, straightforward, sometimes tough-minded local coverage, and the evening
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, which, under the leadership of Joseph Pulitzer II, was becoming one of the best newspapers in America. It excelled in national and international as well as crusading local coverage. Editorially, the
Globe-Democrat
leaned toward the Republicans and the
Post-Dispatch
tended to favor the Democrats (although it was relatively liberal on racial issues), but both the
Post-Dispatch
and the
Globe-Democrat
were modern newspapers in that they at least gave the appearance of being independent of party politics in their news coverage.