Never Been a Time (25 page)

Later, Roger was asked if there were any soldiers around when the men were torching buildings.

“One,” Roger replied.

“What was he doing?”

“Shooting niggers.”
¹⁷

The sun loomed ominously large and low in the western sky, glowing deep orange through the black smoke that rolled up from downtown East St. Louis. Sundown was an hour away, but the light was already dimming as darkness came early to East St. Louis on July 2.

The State Street car stopped at Broadway and Collinsville Avenue, a couple of blocks from city hall, and at about six thirty P.M. Carlos Hurd stepped down into what he later described as “a drama of death.” A fire engine screamed past him heading east, where fires burned along Broadway as far as he could see. A light west wind—and, he soon discovered, men with torches and oily rags—pushed the flames eastward. Then he heard shots, and shouts of “They got him! They got him!” and Hurd ran toward the intersection of Fourth Street, shoving his way through a milling mob of men and a surprising number of women who were shouting and running about excitedly, drunk with murderous exhilaration. He reached the intersection and saw hundreds of people looking south at a row of burning buildings on Fourth Street between Broadway and Walnut Avenue.

Smoke and flames were rising from two- and three-story frame and brick buildings where blacks lived above and in the rear of storefronts. Flames grabbed at the rickety wooden rear stairs—the “fire escapes”—and leaped to the flimsy outbuildings. The fires lent an eerie glow to the scene, and Hurd saw a circle of rioters around the body of a black man who had been shot. His head was bleeding profusely. He tried to rise up, and a boot smashed into his face.

“Don't do that, I haven't hurt nobody,” the man screamed hoarsely, but another kick came. The black man kept struggling with his attackers. A
young man dressed for the office, the only person Hurd recalled seeing among the rioters who looked like a business or professional man, lifted a broken chunk of curbstone and hurled it down at the black's head, silencing him. The natty young man turned and walked away from the now-still body, past a seemingly unconcerned National Guard sergeant and several militiamen, all of them holding rifles. The sergeant strolled over to the circle of rioters around the body and peered down at the black man whose head was in a growing pool of blood.

“This man is done for,” he said. “You men better get away from him.” The sergeant walked away. Hurd asked if he couldn't call an ambulance. “The ambulances quit coming,” the sergeant replied, seemingly without much interest. Another shot pierced the babble of voices and sirens and the suck and roar of fires, and Hurd was horrified to see two men with revolvers taking aim at blacks as they ran one by one from the blazing buildings.

“It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered,” he wrote later that night.

Hurd stayed in East St. Louis for two hours, never getting more than a couple of blocks from where he had stepped down from the trolley car, and then he hurried back across the river to the
Post-Dispatch
headquarters to write with seething anger that what he had seen in the streets of downtown East St. Louis was not so much a riot as a “massacre,” “a man hunt” conducted “on a sporting basis” where “a black skin was a death warrant.”

“I have read of St. Bartholomew's night,” he would write in a report that is remarkable for its personal fury. “I have heard stories of the latter-day crimes of the Turks in Armenia, and I have learned to loathe the German army for its barbarity in Belgium. But I do not believe that Moslem fanaticism or Prussian frightfulness could perpetrate murders of more deliberate brutality than those which I saw committed, in daylight, by citizens of the State of Abraham Lincoln.” Somehow, he wrote, he could not call what he saw “mob violence”:

“A mob is passionate, a mob follows one man or a few men blindly; a mob sometimes takes chances… The East St. Louis men took no chances… They went in small groups, there was little leadership, and there was a horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun about it. I cannot allow even the doubtful excuse of drink. No man whom I saw showed the effects of liquor.” A few men shouted at the mob to stop, and Hurd shouted too, but he concluded,
“Only a volley of lead would have stopped these murderers.” The police were nowhere to be seen, and straggling soldiers stood around and watched, leaning on their rifles, some of them with bayonets bared as men shouted “Get a nigger” and earned a chorus of replies, “Get another!”

“It was,” he judged, “like nothing so much as the holiday crowd, with thumbs turned down, in the Roman Coliseum, except that here the shouters were their own gladiators, and their own wild beasts.”
¹

Robert R. Thomas, owner of the Hill-Thomas Lime and Cement Company south of Broadway on Sixth Street, was eating supper at his home in Lands-downe, about four miles northeast of downtown East St. Louis, when the telephone rang. He knew it would be bad news. “The air was full of lightning that day,” he said later. The distraught foreman of the plant's stables told him a building just north of the company's stables had been set ablaze. The foreman said he was going to move the horses and mules, and Thomas said he would come right back down. When Thomas arrived at the cement company, the flames had spread to the stables and the main plant. A large mob of men stood around, and some of them fired rifles and pistols into the building, which was just beginning to burn. Thomas feared that some of his black teamsters—there were a dozen of them in all—were still in the building, where they had hoped to be safe from marauding mobs, but he decided there was nothing he could do without help. He drove five blocks to city hall, past a couple of dozen soldiers, talking and smoking cigarettes, watching as the riot raged around them.

Jumping from the car at city hall, he asked a group of loitering soldiers who was in charge. He was directed to Colonel Tripp, who was talking to a small group of soldiers, seemingly without urgency. Thomas later recalled:

It took me some little time to get his attention. I butted in once and he told me if I would just wait until he got through with what he was doing, we could probably get along a little faster. I made it so insistent that he finally took notice of what I wanted. I told him some of our men were down there and they probably would be burned up if he didn't get some help. He finally called, maybe, eight soldiers, and it is my recollection that he called them by their
first names—didn't give an order to anybody, but called them over to him and told them to go down there and see what they could do.

One of them said, “I haven't had my supper yet,” and another said, “I just got off duty.” They seemed to know him very well, and he finally persuaded them to go down there. He persuaded them finally to get in a truck. I don't think he put an officer in charge of them.

 

“There were several hundred soldiers right around city hall, coming from upstairs and different rooms around there,” Thomas said. “I am satisfied there were enough soldiers there to at least have made a showing if they had had somebody to show them what to do [but] nobody seemed to be in command.”

Thomas drove back south, past dozens of loitering soldiers, and watched his plant burn to the ground. If the soldiers in the truck ever arrived at the burning plant, they left immediately. A mob of a hundred men surrounded the blaze, Thomas said, “shooting at anybody that would show their head, and shooting at random when there wasn't anybody to shoot at.”

Then he saw several black teamsters run out of the flames without being shot. At this point, the mob seemed more interested in watching the buildings burn down than in taking shots at men fleeing from the fire. It later turned out that two of the company's black teamsters had been wounded in the riot and one man, a twelve-year employee named Moses Keefe, simply disappeared. He is not included in the official death toll—by that point, at least two dozen people were dead—but, according to Thomas, there was enough evidence that he had been killed for an insurance company to pay off Keefe's brother on a $300 life policy.

One of the wounded men was shot trying to get horses away from the fire; the other was ambushed about three blocks south of the plant by a gang of young men firing at blacks fleeing down a main route to the Free Bridge. The man was so badly wounded that he lay immobile in a ditch and was assumed to be dead. At four P.M. the next day, he regained consciousness and was taken by ambulance to a city hospital in St. Louis.
²

Charles Roger stood in the doorway of his Walnut Avenue chemical plant, keeping an eye out for fires while trying to avoid getting himself killed, his
anger growing into rage as he watched militiamen in khaki uniforms standing around joking as a gang of five or six white men set fire to the shacks and flats all around him. A building nearby burst into flames and several blacks dashed out the door and ran east. Half a dozen white men stood and jeered but let the blacks run. One rioter shouted that the soldiers couldn't shoot them if they tried. A soldier replied, “The hell I can't. I'll show you.”

The soldier put the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the small group of blacks running away—they were now perhaps a hundred yards down Walnut Avenue—and squeezed the trigger. One black man fell to the street. The others kept running.

When Roger recited the incident three months later to the congressional committee investigating the riot, Congressman Ben Johnson asked if Roger had gone to see if the man was wounded or dead.

“No, I didn't,” Roger said. “You know, there were a great many instances where really common humanity would urge me to go ahead and interfere, but what were you going to do? You know well enough you would get killed yourself.”
³

By then, Carlos Hurd had walked a block or so south of Broadway, to where rioters were chasing blacks down a railroad spur, firing at them with rifles and pistols. Then he heard more shots coming from Fourth Street, and when he ran there he saw two more blacks lying in the street, apparently dead. Railroad shacks along the street—shacks used by black prostitutes—had been torched, and black women ran from them. A gang of white women began chasing them, cursing and hurling stones. The white women, Hurd wrote that night, were “of the baser sort … I do not wish to be understood as saying that these women were representative of the womanhood of East St. Louis. Their faces showed, all too plainly, exactly who and what they were.” They were prostitutes, and professional jealousy may have had as much to do with their rage as racial hatred.
⁴

Hurd wrote:

One frightened black girl, probably 20 years old, got so far as Broadway with no worse treatment than jeers and thrusts. At Broadway, in view of militiamen, the white women, several of whom had been watching the massacre of the negro men, pounced on the negress… [T]hey were the heroines of the moment with
that gathering of men, and when one man, sick of the brutality he had seen, seized one of the women by the arm to stop an impending blow, he was hustled away, with fists under his nose … “Let the girls have her” was the shout as the women attacked the young negress. The victim's cry, “Please, please, I ain't done nothing,” was stopped by a blow in the mouth with a broomstick, which one of the women swung like a baseball bat. Another woman seized the negress' hands, and the blow was repeated as she struggled helplessly. Fingernails clawed her hair, and the sleeves were torn from her [shirt]waist, when some of the men called, “Now let her see how fast she can run.” The women did not readily leave off beating her, but they stopped short of murder, and the crying, hysterical girl ran down the street.
⁵

A block or so away, fellow
Post-Dispatch
reporter Paul Y. Anderson walked up Broadway and saw mobs all the way to Eighth Street, burning homes and shooting blacks. Two black men tried to save themselves by walking slowly with their hands on top of their heads in a gesture of surrender. Rioters shot both of them.
⁶

The Reverend George W. Allison was at the railroad station downtown when eleven or twelve white women and men—he thought they were all drunk and looked like whores and pimps—rushed into the station and attacked a black woman waiting for a train to take her out of East St. Louis. The station, crowded with men, women, and restless children, turned into bedlam. Allison and a couple of other men tried to protect the woman, getting between her and her attackers, but the terrified black woman darted out from the corner where she was huddling and the white women ripped her clothes off, leaving her in her corset. Allison went immediately to the police station but the mayor wouldn't let him have a policemen to go back and arrest the assailants. One of the officers said, “The truth is that there is no damn town big enough for the two races.”
⁷

Barely two blocks from the police station, Carlos Hurd heard a cheer go up behind him, and when he turned he saw a black man with his head laid open by a paving stone being dragged down an alley toward Fourth Street. Someone
looped a thin rope around his neck. Someone else shouted that the rope was not strong enough, and the men circling around the prone man began laughing and making jokes. The rope was thrown over a cable box low on a light pole, and several men hauled on the rope, pulling the unresisting black man to his feet, where he stood wavering for a few seconds, held like a puppet, until the rope snapped. The victim and one of the men holding the rope tumbled to the ground. An old white man wearing a black, shiny-billed cap ran out of a nearby house, one that had not yet begun to burn, and shouted, “Don't you hang that man in the street. I dare you to!”

The men accepted the dare. The old man was shoved aside, and someone ran up with a stronger rope. “Right there,” Hurd wrote, “I saw the most sickening incident of the evening. To put the rope around the negro's neck, one of the lynchers stuck his finger inside the gaping scalp and lifted the negro's head by it, literally bathing his hand in the man's blood.