Never Been a Time (31 page)

I saw the mob robbing the homes of Negroes and then set fire to them. The soldier stood with folded arms and looked on as the houses burned. I saw a Negro man killed instantly by a member of the mob, men, small boys, and women and little girls all were trying to do something to injure the Negroes… The police and the soldiers were assisting the mob to kill Negroes and to destroy their homes. I saw the mob hang a colored man to a telegraph
pole and riddle him with bullets. I saw the mob chasing a colored man who had a baby in his arms. The mob was shooting at him all of the time as long as I saw him. I ran for my life. I was nearly exhausted when a white man in the block opened the door of his warehouse and told me to go in there and hide. I went in and stayed there the night. The mob bombarded the house during the night, but I was not discovered nor hurt. The mob stole the jewelry of Negroes and used axes and hatchets to chop up pianos and furniture that belonged to them. The mob was seemingly well arranged to do their desperate work. I recognized some of the wealthy people's sons and some of the bank officials in the mob. They were as vile as they could be.

Martha Gruening talked to white soldiers who admitted they disarmed blacks of guns, knives, and razors while not bothering whites armed with rifles, pistols, knives, and clubs. “Miss Gruening,” Du Bois wrote, “wanted to know if they hadn't disarmed any whites at all.”

“They were doubtful. Yes, one remembered he had disarmed a drunken white man who was attacking a white woman.”

Near the end of her interviews, Martha Gruening came upon a frail, elderly black woman picking through the burned ruins of what had been her house, looking futilely for anything worth saving. “What are we to do?” the old woman asked. “We can't live South, and they don't want us North. Where are we to go?”

Du Bois ended the report with the words, “And what of the Federal Government?” The question was purely rhetorical. After East St. Louis, the forty-nine-year-old Du Bois had little if any faith remaining in the white institutions of the United States of America, official or unofficial.
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A few months later, still obsessed with what he had seen and heard in East St. Louis, Du Bois wrote in the
Crisis
an essay entitled “The Black Man and the Unions”:

I am among the few colored men who have tried conscientiously to bring about understanding and co-operation between American Negroes and the Labor Unions… I carry on the title page, for instance, of this magazine the Union label, and yet I know, and
everyone of my Negro readers knows, that the very fact that this label is there is an advertisement that no Negro's hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine, since the International Typographical Union systematically and deliberately excludes every Negro that it dares from membership, no matter what his qualifications.

Even here, however, and beyond the hurt of mine own, I have always striven to recognize the real cogency of the Union argument. Collective bargaining has, undoubtedly, raised modern labor from something like chattel slavery to the threshold of industrial freedom, and in this advance of labor white and black have shared. I have tried, therefore to see a vision of vast union between the laboring forces, particularly in the South, and hoped for no distant day when the black laborer and the white laborer, instead of being used against each other as helpless pawns, should unite to bring real democracy in the South …

The whole scheme … of playing off black workers against white … is essentially a mischievous and dangerous program … but it is particularly disheartening to realize that it is the Labor Unions themselves that have given this movement its greatest impulse, and that today, at last, in East St. Louis have brought the most unwilling of us to acknowledge that in the present Union movement, as represented by the American Federation of Labor, there is absolutely no hope of justice for an American of Negro descent.
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Despite pleas for a federal investigation from dozens of prominent political, religious, business, and labor leaders, and a hand-delivered petition from the NAACP containing fifteen thousand signatures that called for an investigation and federal antilynching legislation, President Woodrow Wilson continued to ignore the riot. Prominent blacks led by James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the NAACP, decided to catch the president's attention and perhaps force his hand with an unprecedented demonstration in America's largest city. They waited until Du Bois had returned to New York from East St. Louis and, on Saturday, July 28, Du Bois and Johnson joined eight to ten thousand blacks in marching down Fifth Avenue to the funereal beat of muffled drums in a silent protest against the riot and horrific torture lynching
in Memphis and Waco, Texas, calling for immediate action on federal anti-lynching legislation. Some of the marchers carried signs addressed to Wilson:

The Silent Parade along Fifth Avenue in New York City

 

MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?
PRAY FOR THE LADY MACBETHS OF EAST ST. LOUIS
YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD

 

The Silent Parade was America's first major civil rights march. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis has written, “It seems inconceivable today that this was the first time a procession such as this had been seen in New York City … The Silent Parade, captured in a widely reprinted photograph, was the second impressive sign [after the picketing of
The Birth of a Nation
] that there existed an aggressive national civil rights organization representing black people.” Along the parade route of more than twenty blocks, black Boy
Scouts handed out fliers that proclaimed, “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis and East St. Louis, by rousing the conscience of the country and bringing the murderers of our brothers, sisters and innocent children to justice.”
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The Silent Parade inspired blacks across America and, along with the riot in East St. Louis, became a primal element in the memory of a race only half a century out of slavery, a memory that persisted through the decades. In the 1930s, growing up almost six hundred miles east of East St. Louis in Lorain, Ohio, a legendary stop on the Underground Railroad, young Toni Morrison heard the stories and, like Miles Davis of East St. Louis, she never forgot what she had been told about the summer when whites slaughtered blacks in the state of Abraham Lincoln and thousands of African Americans marched in protest down white America's wealthiest avenue. The riot hovers like a dark force over her 1992 novel,
Jazz
, whose doomed central character—perhaps based in part on Josephine Baker—survives the riot that killed her parents and burned her childhood home to the ground, but never feels safe, even in the midst of America's largest black city, Harlem.

Morrison's protagonist, a girl named Dorcas, is so shattered by the experience of the riot that she cannot speak of it. She stands silently with her aunt Alice in Harlem for three hours and watches the Silent Parade, the two of them “marveling at the cold black faces and listening to drums saying what the graceful women and the marching men could not… It was July in 1917 and the beautiful faces were cold and quiet; moving slowly into the space the drums were building for them … down Fifth Avenue from curb to curb, came a tide of cold black faces, speechless and unblinking because what they had meant to say but did not trust themselves to say the drums said for them.”
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Among the organizers of the Silent Parade was Madam C. J. Walker, who had become wealthy manufacturing and selling hair- and skin-care products for black women. She, like many others, saw the East St. Louis riot as simply lynching on a large scale, and it struck a particularly strong emotional note within her. She had lived and worked for sixteen years in St. Louis as a young woman, and had friends on both sides of the Mississippi. Two of Walker's best friends from those days worked as volunteers caring for the thousands of refugees who fled East St. Louis, and they had heartrending stories to tell.
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Three days after the Silent Parade, Madam Walker joined James Weldon Johnson and other black leaders in a trip to Washington. Their intention, they
announced, was to meet with the president to protest “the atrocious attacks… at East St. Louis and other industrial centers recently,” saying they represented not only “the colored people of Greater New York” but “the sentiments and aspirations and sorrows, too, of the entire Negro population of the United States.” Promised a meeting with Wilson himself, they planned to urge the president to “speak some public word that would give hope and courage to the Negroes of the United States,” but when the committee reached the White House they were informed that Wilson was too busy in negotiations over a farm bill to see them. They met instead with Wilson's secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who had advised Wilson in private that if he addressed the issues of lynching and the East St. Louis riot, “the fire will be re-kindled.”
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Madam C. J. Walker

In their petition to the president, the delegation stressed black loyalty to the United States, pointing out that a higher proportion of blacks than whites had registered for the recent draft, and they implored Wilson to use
“his great personal and moral influence in our behalf.” Noting that the law had not punished “a single one” of the lynchers responsible for the murder of “2,867 colored men and women” since 1885, they asked that “lynching and mob violence be made a national crime punishable by the laws of the United States,” adding, “No nation that seeks to fight the battles of civilization can afford to march in blood-smeared garments.”

After being assured by Tumulty that the president was “in sympathy” with American blacks, the delegation was dismissed, and Madam Walker, Johnson, and the other members of the ad hoc committee went to Capitol Hill, where several congressman agreed that an investigation should be held of the East St. Louis riot. Among them was Republican representative L. C. Dyer, who not only had been horrified by the riot but fretted that people not from his area would confuse East St. Louis, Illinois, with the city he represented, St. Louis, Missouri. Dyer had already introduced a resolution calling for a congressional investigation of the riot and began working with civil rights leaders on legislation to make lynching a federal crime. He first introduced what came to be called the Dyer Bill in 1918, although it would be several years before any congressional action was taken on it.
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Missouri Representative L. C. Dyer

Despite the appeals of black leaders and many prominent whites, Wilson decided there wasn't enough evidence that federal laws had been violated to justify an investigation of a riot that killed at least forty-eight people and shut down one of the nation's main transportation hubs. A majority of the House of Representatives thought differently. In response to Dyer's resolution, the Committee to Investigate Conditions in Illinois and Missouri Interfering with Interstate Commerce Between Said States was formed, and five congressmen were named to it.