Never Been a Time (24 page)

Hurd had covered natural disasters, murders, major fires, and bitter labor battles, but had never seen anything like the horror that reporters were
breathlessly describing to him over the telephone from East St. Louis. Every hour or so, Anderson or one of his legmen would call in with reports of the latest atrocity, and Hurd would incorporate the news into the expanding story that would dominate the front page of the next day's paper. Hurd, an Iowa Congregationalist minister's son, had what a friend described as “a tidy mind,” and finally he decided he needed to see the riot for himself to comprehend it fully. When Hurd had begun work at the
Post-Dispatch
in 1900, he had sped to assignments on a bicycle, and once, in his early years, he had been arrested in East St. Louis for “scorching”—speeding—on his bike. Now forty years old, he was still in a hurry, but he rode the streetcar. After telling managing editor O. K. Bovard what he was doing, and getting Bovard's approval, he left the office about six fifteen P.M. By then, about 160 National Guard troops had arrived in East St. Louis.
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Carlos Hurd and his wife in Venice, Italy, in 1912

About five P.M., in a spectacular conflagration, four rickety old houses where blacks lived in an area of warehouses and stores near the downtown East St.
Louis railroad yards seemed to burst into flames simultaneously, as if from the coordinated actions of several men. The houses were at Main Street and Brady Avenue, about three blocks south of city hall. Half a dozen black men tried to run out of the torched houses. Armed rioters fired at them, hitting several. The wounded men were picked up by their arms and legs and thrown back into the burning buildings. A half-dozen soldiers were leaning against a wall across the street, watching. They held rifles, and had full cartridge belts, but the men did nothing. They were leaderless and seemed “overwhelmed,” observed Roy Albertson. Even if they had wanted to stop the riot—and nothing in their posture suggested they did—without leaders they were “like lost babes in the woods,” decided Albertson.
⁹

By then, the mob had broken up into amoeba-like clusters that were moving through the streets of downtown, with the center of the riot in the heart of the city at Fourth and Broadway, about two blocks south of city hall. At five forty, another fire alarm sounded, this time signaling a new fire on Walnut Avenue, a block south of Broadway, and the siren kept blowing and was echoed from other parts of town. There were many more fires than East St. Louis had firemen or trucks or water pressure to fight, and sirens sounded unheeded into the night.

As the smoke from the flames rose into the air above East St. Louis, and thousands of blacks fled across the Mississippi River to Missouri, large crowds of St. Louisans, black and white, came down to the levee to watch the exodus. Among them, barely able to believe her eyes, was an eleven-year-old girl named Freda Josephine McDonald. Many years later, after she had become internationally famous as Josephine Baker, she wrote down what she had seen and heard that horrible day.

She and her family lived in a tiny shack near downtown St. Louis. Her father was on relief, and she often woke up hungry, as she did on Monday, July 2. That afternoon, she wrote:

 

An ominous humming sound filled the air. It seemed to be drawing nearer.

“Is there a storm coming, Mama?” my brother Richard asked.

“No, not a storm, child, it's the whites.”

“Wait, Mama, I have to get my babies.”

Two tiny black-and-white puppies shared the bed in which
we children huddled together for warmth. I had discovered them half dead in a trash can while I was sorting through garbage. They barely had the strength to whine … Gathering my babies up, I hurried along behind Mama, who had picked up little Willie May and was pushing Richard and my sister Margaret out the door.

What I saw before me as I stepped outside had been described at church that Sunday by the Reverend in dark, spine-chilling tones. This was the Apocalypse. Clouds, glowing from the incandescent light of huge flames leaping upward from the riverbank, raced across the sky… but not as quickly as the breathless figures that dashed in all directions. The entire black community appeared to be fleeing.

A precocious child budding into womanhood, Josephine had already been planning on leaving St. Louis and heading for Broadway, and the riot made St. Louis even less bearable, as mistrust increased between the races and the color line became even more rigid. Two years later, the thirteen-year-old stepped onto a train at Union Station, just a few blocks from the ghetto where she lived, and headed east. Before Josephine Baker was out of her teens, her singing and dancing, her wit and her beauty, her powerful ambition and the unstoppable desire never again to live anywhere remotely close to racist East St. Louis—even, it would seem, in the same nation—had made her a star in New York and then in Paris, where she remained.
¹⁰

All afternoon and evening in East St. Louis, huge crowds of black men, women, and children, some of them carrying battered suitcases or large shopping bags filled with clothes and other belongings, some of them with little more than the clothes they wore, were also fleeing to the east out Illinois and Cahokia avenues, away from the Mississippi River. Dr. Thomas Hunter, the black surgeon who had left downtown when the rioting had intensified, was standing with his wife and others at Nineteenth Street in his mostly black, middle-class neighborhood well east of downtown watching the mass exodus. He recognized a patient and asked what was going on downtown. “Oh, doctor,” the man said, “they are killing and beating our people. And they are burning everything down there at Fifth and Broadway.”

“My god,” said Hunter. “What about my office?”

“It's gone,” the man replied. “Burned down.”

Hunter was unnerved by the news. He had heard rumors that “business Negroes”—Bundy and other influential men in the black community—were going to be targeted by rioters, and he feared that his house would be attacked as well. “I think we had better get in the machine and take to the tall weeds,” he said, but then he had second thoughts. There were too many people, including a druggist and his family and two female schoolteachers, to fit in his car, and he didn't want to abandon anyone to the riot. He decided they would be safer staying where they were as long as they kept away from his own home. They found shelter at a neighbor's house. “I guess it will be just about as safe there as any other place,” Hunter said, “and we will all be together.”
¹¹

Mayor Mollman and Colonel Tripp stayed at the meeting at the chamber of commerce into the late afternoon, arguing with each other and chamber members, seemingly at a loss as to how to stop the destruction and murder going on around them. Lawyer Dan McGlynn told the mayor that “two or three determined men” could stop the riot in its tracks. He said later, “I remember there were four or five of us there that said if we didn't get proper assurance from the Mayor that we would do something … We could go over to a hardware store and get some shotguns and rifles and get out and undertake to save the town from being burned up. [But] the mayor assured us that Colonel Tripp was here and that everything would be all right in just a little while.”
¹²

At about that point, Colonel Tripp left the meeting. He received a report from police he felt he couldn't ignore. Armed blacks were forming a mob in a saloon “out in the colored districts” around Seventeenth and Bond and were preparing to attack whites wherever they found them. Tripp and the chief of police and a couple of soldiers headed east, with assistant city attorney Fekete driving. They were followed by an army truck intended to hold prisoners. They found about fifteen black men sitting in the saloon, taking it easy. “Beer was on the table,” Tripp reported later, “but there was no disorder. I told them if they lived there they had a right to remain, but if they had any arms to surrender them.” Nobody said anything. Tripp asked the bartender if he was “organizing any forces of colored people.” He said he wasn't. Tripp and Chief Payne began searching people, and they found that one man was holding twelve or fifteen shotgun cartridges. They had been split with a knife. The effect of cutting the cartridge would be that all of the tiny lead balls
would tend to explode from the barrel in a single lethal lump, like a bullet fired from a big-game hunting rifle. The man was arrested. In a cubbyhole in the saloon, where a bartender might reach for it if there was trouble, they found a loaded rifle. The rifle and shotgun shells were confiscated, and the other men were told to go home.

The saloon adjoined a garage owned by Dr. Leroy Bundy. Tripp was told by the men in the saloon that they hadn't seen Bundy all day. A search of the black leader's garage by the soldiers revealed nothing but auto supplies and stationery. On a tip by the black bartender, Tripp and Payne searched a saloon across the street that had a white clientele. They found and confiscated another gun. The white men said they hadn't seen Bundy for a couple of days. Tripp and his military escort walked down the street to Bundy's house. His wife said she hadn't seen him for about twenty-four hours.
¹³

Late that afternoon, black policeman John Eubanks got a call at his home northeast of downtown from the chief of detectives asking him to come down to the police station. Eubanks kissed his wife good-bye and told her to stay away from the windows and head east at the first sound of gunfire. He walked downtown by Missouri Avenue, staying well clear of now-embattled Broadway, and went up to the detective bureau on the second floor. The chief of detectives said, “John, I tell you things are in an awful condition. They've been rioting all over town. It seems like there's a dozen mobs working in the city. I've got to leave the office, and I want you to stay here and take charge and answer any calls that come in.” Eubanks remained on duty in the police station until the next morning, and then was sent to city hall to help with the hundreds of refugees from the riot being sheltered there.
¹⁴

Nearby, at Broadway and Collinsville, members of the Illinois National Guard leaned on their rifles as blacks were beaten and kicked. One older black man on his way home from work ran from the mob, his lunch pail swinging in his right hand, and tried to protect himself by heading for a line of national guardsmen. Several of the militiamen held the man off with bared bayonets, and forced him back into the arms of the mob. He was beaten until he fell down, and then kicked in the head. He tried to shield his face, but soon was unconscious, and the kicks continued. An ambulance pulled up, but a white man standing over the body threatened to kill the
driver if he picked up the black man. The ambulance driver, an agonized look on his smoke-streaked face, stood silent for a moment, staring at the white man, and then turned and drove away. The next day, the old black man lay dead in a black funeral parlor that was crowded with bodies. His arm, stiffened from rigor, still shielded his face.

The ambulance driver drove off toward the downtown railroad station, where another black man had been reported lying in blood, badly injured or dead. Behind him, siren blaring, was a fire engine heading in the same direction. New fires were springing up all around downtown.
¹⁵

Standing on Broadway, Baptist preacher George W. Allison heard the sirens scream past him, rising and falling in pitch. He could see the fires nearby in the Black Valley and a mob of white men, as he later put it, “hunting for Negroes [who] were not armed or could not defend themselves.” The whites carefully stayed away from the most dangerous section of the Valley, the so-called Bad Lands along Walnut, until fires had spread into that area and sent blacks scattering. At that point the whites could shoot them down and then advance like foot soldiers entering enemy territory after an artillery barrage.
¹⁶

On Sixth Street, in the midst of all the chaos, Charles Roger was standing outside of his chemical plant when a man in a passing mob of whites gestured with his thumb at the building and said, “There's a place that would make a good fire.” But another man looked over at Roger and grinned. “Leave that place alone,” the man said. “He's no nigger lover. He don't have any niggers.” Roger employed two blacks, but was immensely relieved that the men did not know that. The man who had spared his plant looked only vaguely familiar, and Roger was struck with how few of the rioters he recognized, even though he had spent so many years and so much time in the midst of the working men of East St. Louis. He had even seen a couple of strangers wearing what looked like brand-new blue cotton work shirts and pants, as if they had bought them to blend in with working men. He wondered where they came from.

The men walked on by, heading east, and the fires spread in that direction until Roger's plant and warehouses were covered in dense smoke. Although small fires sprang up from time to time on the building, Roger and the few employees who stayed with him were able to extinguish them. By the next morning, his plant was the only building standing in four square blocks.